David Maxson Harris (he/him/his), Legal Fellow, is a graduate of UC Berkeley School of Law, where he specialized in international human rights and public interest law. In Berkeley Law’s International Human Rights Law Clinic, David helped pass legislation promoting human rights-centered U.S. border policies and develop a truth commission on racialized police violence in San Francisco. David also drafted scholarship with Professor Laurel E. Fletcher as a fellow in the Miller Institute for Global Challenges and the Law, represented LGBTQ+ asylum seekers through the California Asylum Representation Clinic, and served as a Senior Executive Editor of the California Law Review and on the steering committee of the Law and Political Economy Society.
Before joining CJA, David was an intern at the Impact Fund and the National Center for Lesbian Rights and a litigation paralegal at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, focusing on public interest matters ranging from gay conversion therapy to food insecurity, prisoners’ rights, and immigration.
David holds a B.A. from Columbia University, where he codirected the university’s Amnesty International chapter. His research focused on U.S. inaction during the Rwandan genocide and Amnesty International’s preclusion of Nelson Mandela as a prisoner of conscience in apartheid South Africa.
David is based in San Francisco, California. He is bilingual in English and French and intermediately proficient in Mandarin and Russian.
