Tanner Lockhead

Tanner Lockhead, Columbia ’22, currently serves as a law clerk on the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.  Following graduation from law school, Tanner was a Litigation Fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in Washington, DC.  At LDF, Tanner focused on voting rights and school desegregation, including serving as counsel in Allen v. Milligan at the Supreme Court.  Before law school, Tanner was an AmeriCorps Fellow at the Community Empowerment Fund in North Carolina where he led initiatives on employment and crisis services for people transitioning out of homelessness.  Before that, Tanner worked on LGBTQ discrimination at the Brookings Institution and human trafficking policy at the North Carolina Department of Justice.

At Columbia, Tanner was a Hamilton Fellow and Kent Scholar, and he received the Jane Marks Murphy Prize for his work in clinic on access to justice in state civil courts.  Tanner interned at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division where he focused on systemic police misconduct during the summer of 2020.  He was also a Summer Associate at WilmerHale in Washington, DC.  Tanner was Public Interest Chair of OutLaws, Articles Editor for A Jailhouse Lawyers’ Manual, and a coach for the Gender & Sexuality Law Moot Court.  Tanner has also published legal scholarship on voting rights in the California Law Review and the North Carolina Central Law Review.

Tanner received his B.A. in Public Policy, cum laude, from Duke University, where he was a Benjamin N. Duke Scholar.  He is admitted to practice in North Carolina and the District of Columbia.