Public Rights Project

Jill Habig founded Public Rights Project in 2017 to ensure that the rights of our most vulnerable communities would never again rest on the outcome of a single federal election. While Public Rights Project is a relatively new organization, the idea has been over a decade in the making. Beginning in 2006, Jill helped create the San Francisco Affirmative Litigation Project (SFALP) as a law student at Yale Law School, which partnered Yale students with attorneys in the San Francisco City Attorney’s Office to develop high-impact litigation. That project has yielded tremendous results both for Yale students and the City, including national cases addressing payday lending, arbitration fraud, and LGBT rights. Jill later spent her first year as a lawyer in that office, working on the landmark trial challenging Proposition 8 to establish marriage equality in California. After moving to the state level to work for then-Attorney General Kamala Harris, Jill led the creation and launch of the Attorney General’s Bureau of Children’s Justice in 2015 and oversaw its civil rights and consumer protection investigations.

These experiences demonstrated the impact state and local governments could have on the most basic rights and freedoms of their residents, when they had the resources, talent, and leadership committed to using government power in service of the most vulnerable among us. Jill founded Public Rights Project to set a new standard for what is expected of our state and local governments when it comes to protecting our legal rights. Jill has been recognized as an Open Society Foundations Leadership in Government Fellow, and has been a Lecturer in Law at Yale and Berkeley Law Schools.