Maya Harris

Early life and education

Born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Harris grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the daughter of an Indian mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan Harris (1938–2009), a breast cancer researcher, who emigrated from Chennai, India, in 1960, and a Jamaican-American father, Donald Harris, a Stanford University economics professor. Her maternal grandfather, Rajam Gopalan, was an Indian diplomat. They were raised with beliefs from Baptist and Hindu faiths. When she was 8, she and her older sister, Kamala, worked to get the apartment building they lived in to open an unused courtyard as a place for children to play. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1989. That year, she enrolled in Stanford Law School. While at Stanford, she was active with the East Palo Alto Community Law Project, serving as Co-Coordinator of the Domestic Violence Clinic and Co-Chair of the Student Steering Committee.

Legal career

Following law school, Harris served as a law clerk for United States District Court Judge James Ware in the Northern District of California. In 1994 Harris joined the San Francisco law firm of Jackson Tuffs Cole & Black, LLP, working in civil and criminal litigation. In 1997 the Young Lawyers Division of the National Bar Association honored her with the Junius W. Williams Young Lawyer of the Year Award. The following year, she was named one of the Top 20 Up and Coming Lawyers Under 40 by the San Francisco Daily Journal.

Harris served as a law professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. She also taught contract law at New College of California School of Law and Lincoln Law School of San Jose. At 29, she was one of the youngest deans of a law school in the United States.

Advocacy

Harris was a Senior Associate at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute dedicated to advancing economic and social equity. In that capacity, she organized conferences around police-community relations and advocated for police reform, authoring Organized for Change: The Activist's Guide to Police Reform.

Harris served as Executive Director of the Northern California American Civil Liberties Union. In her role as the head of the largest affiliate office of the ACLU, Harris directed and coordinated litigation, media relations, lobbying, and grassroots organizing work. "The Project's priorities are eliminating racial disparities in the criminal justice system and achieving educational equity in California public schools." In 2003, Harris was the Northern California director for No on 54, the campaign to defeat Proposition 54, which sought to end affirmative action in the state.

Harris authored the essay "Fostering Accountable Community-Centered Policing", which appeared in the 2006 book The Covenant with Black America.

In 2012 Harris was Vice President for Democracy, Rights and Justice at the Ford Foundation. One of the issues she addresses through her position is the problem of child brides.

Personal life

Harris is married to Tony West. She has a daughter from a previous relationship, Meena Harris. She and West met at Stanford Law during registration in 1989, when then 5-year-old Meena tried to play hide-and-seek with him. They became friends and began a relationship after graduation.. Meena graduated from Stanford before attending Harvard Law. She has one granddaughter, Amara.