Headshot of Grayce Zelphin

Grayce Zelphin

Interim REJ Program Director

Grayce Zelphin is a Senior Staff Attorney for the Racial & Economic Justice Program at the ACLU of Northern California, where she engages in both litigation and policy advocacy focusing on issues promoting racial and economic justice. Grayce is also part of the California statewide Education Equity and Economic Justice groups. 

Prior to joining the ACLU, Grayce was a litigation associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and at Boies, Schiller, Flexner in Los Angeles. While in private practice, Grayce represented clients in complex class action litigation and appellate advocacy, as well as counseling clients in the technology, products liability, and higher education space. She also maintained a dedicated pro bono practice, including co-counseling with the ACLU of Southern California in Hernandez v. Lynch, which challenged arbitrary bail amounts for immigrant detainees, and with the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund in Buck v. Davis, which challenged a death sentence that relied on a purported expert's testimony that the defendant was a future danger because he was Black.   

Grayce also previously served as the inaugural director of Berkeley Law's judicial clerkship program. In that role, she developed and managed Berkeley Law's clerkship program, and led efforts to highlight and demystify postgraduate judicial clerkships for students through programming and counseling while fostering and maintaining relationships between the university and state and federal judges across the country. 

Grayce is a former law clerk to the Honorable Consuelo B. Marshall (U.S. District Court, Central District of California) and the Honorable Ann Claire Williams (U.S. Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit Court). 

Grayce graduated from Berkeley Law, where she was an original and founding member of the Women of Color Collective, an active member of the Law Students of African Descent, and served as an intern in the Washington, D.C. office of the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles in Critical Race Theory: Public Policy & Law.