Theodore M. Shaw was director-counsel and president of the NAACP Legal Defence and Educational Fund (LDF), the premier civil rights law firm in the United States, from 2004 to 2008. In March 2008 the Columbia Law School faculty appointed him as a professor of professional practice, teaching civil procedure and constitutional law.
Shaw, one of the nation’s leading voices in civil rights, joined LDF in 1982 and in 2004 became the fifth person to lead the organisation. While at LDF, he was lead counsel in a coalition that represented African-American and Latino students in the University of Michigan undergraduate affirmative action admissions case. That case, Gratz v. Bollinger, went before the United States Supreme Court in 2003, along with Grutter v. Bollinger, which challenged the use of affirmative action at The University of Michigan Law School.

Shaw worked as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice from 1979 to 1982, where he litigated civil rights cases at the trial and appellate levels and at the U.S. Supreme Court. He currently serves on the Legal Advisory Network of the European Roma Rights Council based in Budapest, Hungary.
Shaw previously has taught at Columbia, University of Michigan, Temple and CUNY law schools. He is the recipient of the Wien Prize for Social Responsibility from Columbia Law School; the A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., Memorial Award from the National Bar Association Young Lawyers Division; and the Baldwin Medal from the Wesleyan University alumni body.