Josh Blecher-Cohen is the Liman Fellow at the ACLU of Illinois, where he is interim director of the LGBTQ & HIV Project and challenges unlawful discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. In that role, he has litigated constitutional cases on behalf of transgender people in state and federal prisons, including landmark victories in a class action against the State of Illinois (Monroe v. Meeks) and in an ongoing suit against the federal Bureau of Prisons (Iglesias v. Federal Bureau of Prisons). He was also involved in the successful campaign to fully repeal Illinois’s HIV-criminalization statute.

Josh’s academic writing has appeared in the Yale Law Journal and been supported by the Library of Congress. He previously worked at the Department of Justice’s civil appellate staff and the Constitutional Accountability Center. Josh graduated from Yale Law School, where he was managing editor of the Yale Law Journal and student director of the Supreme Court Advocacy Clinic. Before law school, he earned an M.St. from Oxford and an A.B. from Harvard.