Cedric Merlin Powell received his B.A. with Honors in Politics from Oberlin College in 1984 and his J.D. in 1987 from New York University School of Law, where he served as Managing Editor of The N.Y.U. Review of Law and Social Change. Prior work experiences include a judicial clerkship with the Honorable Julia Cooper Mack of the D.C. Court of Appeals from 1987-88, a one-year term as Karpatkin Fellow in the national office of the American Civil Liberties Union in New York from 1988-89, and as a litigation associate with the New York law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, from 1989-93.

He is a member of the Ohio and New York state bars, and is admitted to practice before the Supreme Court of the United States, and the federal courts of the Second and Sixth Circuits, and the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York.

Professor Powell has written over a broad range of topics including affirmative action and Critical Race Theory, the First Amendment and hate speech, and the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. All of his scholarship critiques neutrality as a means of preserving structural inequality, and advances theories of substantive equality which reject colorblindness and post-racialism as normative principles in constitutional analysis.