Legal Director
Legal Director Allison Elgart joined the Equal Justice Society in October 2011. She was previously an associate in the San Francisco office of Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, LLP where she primarily focused on consumer protection and employment class action litigation.
Allison was named to The Recorder‘s 2013 “50 California Lawyers on the Fast Track” list, which recognizes 50 attorneys whose early accomplishments indicate they will be tomorrow’s top lawyers and leaders.
Allison is a 2005 graduate of Harvard Law School, where she was the Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review and worked as a student attorney at the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau, representing low-income clients in housing, domestic, immigration and benefits cases. She has degrees in Public Policy and Psychology from Brown University.
Allison has given MCLE presentations on implicit bias and the law to attorneys through nonprofit organizations, the Bar Association of San Francisco, and the ABA Criminal Justice Litigation Section. She has co-authored numerous amicus briefs to the Supreme Court on behalf of social psychologists, sociologists, and legal scholars. Allison co-authored “Lessons from Mt. Holly: Leading Scholars Demonstrate Need for Disparate Impact Standard to Combat Implicit Bias” in the Hastings Race & Poverty Law Journal, “The School to Prison Pipeline: How Implicit Bias Colors Discipline” in the Washington Journal of Education Law and Policy, and “The Promise of Diversity in Remedying the Harms of Identity-Related Threats and Racial Isolation” in the recently published volume, Affirmative Action and Racial Equity: Considering the Evidence in Fisher to Forge the Path Ahead. Allison is also a Lecturer in Law at Stanford Law School and teaches a course entitled “Strategic Litigation for Racial Justice”.
Allison is a member of the California and New York bars.
Allison clerked for the Hon. Robert P. Patterson, Jr., United States District Court, Southern District of New York. She was also a summer law clerk for Public Advocates in San Francisco, where she worked on education and housing litigation.
aelgart@equaljusticesociety.org
415-288-8700