Dan Korobkin became legal director of the ACLU of Michigan in 2019. He has been an ACLU of Michigan attorney since 2008, and served as deputy legal director for five years. His civil rights advocacy and leadership spans a wide range of issues, from criminal law reform to LGBTQ+ rights to freedom of speech and religion.
Dan’s passion for civil rights and civil liberties stretches back to 2002, when he helped the United States Department of Justice investigate systemic civil rights violations involving local law enforcement agencies and juvenile detention facilities. Later that year he became an investigator for the Public Defender Service of the District of Columbia, where he worked on major felony cases in support of that agency’s mission to deliver equal justice under law. The following summer he worked on death penalty cases in Alabama, Arkansas and Louisiana for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
In Michigan, Dan has been a leader in the ACLU of Michigan’s work to end juvenile life without parole, having litigated the pathbreaking Hill v. Snyder class action lawsuit from 2010 until a settlement was reached in 2020. He also helped spearhead the ACLU of Michigan’s debtor’s prison work, known for challenging the unconstitutional “pay or stay” sentencing practices in local courts.
More recently, Dan supervised the ACLU of Michigan’s class action lawsuit challenging bail practices in Detroit’s 36th District Court. In 2022, he argued and won Johnson v. VanderKooi, in which the Michigan Supreme Court held unconstitutional the Grand Rapids Police Department’s policy of taking people’s fingerprints when they had not been charged with a crime.
Dan also represented a class of schoolchildren seeking special education services in the wake of the Flint Water Crisis, and he was on the legal team representing Aimee Stephens, a transgender woman whose employment discrimination case led to a historic victory in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020. In 2021, Dan was recognized as Lawyer of the Year by Michigan Lawyers Weekly.
Korobkin has a law degree from Yale Law School and a bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College. Prior to working at the ACLU, Korobkin served as a law clerk to U.S. District Judge Myron H. Thompson in Montgomery, Alabama and to Judge Robert D. Sack on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He grew up in Ann Arbor.
