LAURIE HARRIS

Scholar and Attorney

Laurie Harris is a visiting faculty member at UCSB, where she designed the curriculum for and teaches the undergraduate course in “Global Business Ethics” for the Department of Global and International Studies. In 2004 she was invited to develop and teach the first course in Applied Environmental Ethics to be offered at the Bren School. She created and teaches the course “Ethics, Enterprise and Leadership” for the Department of Religious Studies and the Walter H. Capps Center, the first course to be offered through the Capps Center. She has been a visiting scholar at the Aspen Institute Seminars, is a frequent guest lecturer and commentator in organizational and personal ethics, and is a consultant to nonprofit organizations on ethics issues. She annually presents a series of colloquia in ethics at the Bren School, focused on environmental decision-making and issues in global environmental ethics. 

Ms. Harris received her Juris Doctor from Boalt Hall School of Law, at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was the first woman to be president of her law school class and commencement speaker. Sher received her BA from UCLA. She has been a law professor at Loyola University Law School, served as a faculty member and associate director of the National Institute of Trial Advocacy (NITA) at the USC Law Center, and was chief of the Appellate Division of the Los Angeles City Attorney's office. She was engaged in the private practice of law for many years and now serves as the managing partner of a real estate and investment busines,s in addition to her work at UCSB. She also continues to lecture for NITA at Loyola University Law School. In 2001, she was selected by California Lutheran University as the first speaker in its Distinguished Speaker Series, presented by the CLU Center for Leadership and Values.

As the only Central Coast attorney chosen to serve on the selection commission of Senator Barbara Boxer's first Federal Judicial Selection Committee for the Central District, she was involved in screening and recommending nominees for the federal bench.

She has served on numerous blue-ribbon committees of the California State Bar and the Los Angeles County Bar Association, and was a member of the special task force that analyzed the work of the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office for District Attorney Gil Garcetti.

Since 1995, she has conducted significant quantitative and qualitative research at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall on the emergence of women in law and the effect of this movement on legal education and society. Her research has been facilitated by former Boalt Hall Dean Herma Hill Kay and will form the basis for a book she is writing about the impact of women on law.

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