Maya Harris

Harris was born in 1967, the second child of Shyamala Gopalan Harris, a breast-cancer researcher who left India, at nineteen, to get her doctorate at U.C. Berkeley, and Donald Harris, a Jamaican economist who taught at Stanford. Maya and her sister, Kamala, were raised by their mother. Kamala is the attorney general of California, and will likely soon be elected a U.S. senator. Maya Harris’s husband, Tony West, served as an associate attorney general of the United States at the Department of Justice, after being nominated by President Obama, in 2012. Harris put herself through Stanford Law School, where she became close friends with Michelle Alexander, the civil-rights lawyer and legal scholar; together, they organized a campus protest the day that they learned the verdict of the Rodney King case. After completing law school, Harris clerked for James Ware, a black judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Next, to pay off her student debt, she joined a private firm as a litigator, and taught law, with a focus on gender discrimination, on the side. At twenty-nine, she became one of the youngest law-school deans in the country, at Lincoln Law School of San Jose. At seventeen, she gave birth to a daughter. Meena, now thirty-one, is a Stanford- and Harvard-educated attorney who works at Slack.