Maya Harris, ACLU-NC Executive Director

Maya Harris, appointed in October 2006 as Executive Director of the ACLU of Northern California, is a statewide leader on civil rights and civil liberties issues. As head of the 72-year-old organization, she oversees the work of 50 staff members, including nine attorneys and three lobbyists in Sacramento. With 55,000 members, the ACLU-NC is the largest affiliate in the nation.

Harris joined the ACLU-NC in 2003 as Director of the affiliate’s Racial Justice Project. In 2005, she became the Associate Director, developing and implementing the ACLU-NC's priority campaigns and overseeing the Policy Department, including work in the areas of racial justice, police practices, and the death penalty.  Most recently, in 2006, she served as lead counsel for the ACLU-NC in League of Women Voters v. McPherson, a successful lawsuit restoring the voting rights of over 100,000 Californians who were wrongfully disenfranchised.

Before joining the ACLU, Harris was a Senior Associate at PolicyLink, where she conducted research and policy advocacy on policing issues. While at PolicyLink, she also authored the national publications “Community-Centered Policing: A Force for Change” and “Organized for Change: The Activist's Guide to Police Reform.”

Prior to that, she served as Dean of Lincoln Law School of San Jose. At the time of her appointment as Dean, the National Law Journal reported that, “at age 29, she is perhaps the youngest law school dean in the country.” Harris has also served as an adjunct law professor at several Bay Area law schools and worked in civil litigation at the San Francisco law firm of Jackson Tufts Cole & Black, LLP.

She received the Junius W. Williams Young Lawyer of the Year Award from the National Bar Association and was named one of the Top 20 Under 40 lawyers by California's leading legal newspaper, The Daily Journal.

Harris is also a contributing author to the recently published book “Covenant with Black America,” a collection of essays by African-Americans that climbed to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list. She has published commentary in numerous media outlets, and has a regular column in The Post, an African-American newspaper distributed throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Harris is a graduate of University of California-Berkeley and Stanford Law School.