Jessica E. Harris

Jessica Harris has devoted her career to representing working people, faculty members, and unions. She joined Gladstein, Reif & Meginniss in 2016, following a two-year clerkship with the Honorable Janet Bond Arterton, United States District Judge for the District of Connecticut.

Ms. Harris is an active member of the firm’s higher education practice, representing individual faculty members and faculty groups at colleges and universities all over the country. She has successfully represented faculty members in tenure, promotion, and non-reappointment disputes; Title IX, Title VI, and other discrimination or misconduct investigations and appeals; grievances; severance negotiations and tenure buy-outs; and in litigation. She has also advised faculty unions in collective bargaining and contract administration.

Over the last decade, Ms. Harris has also successfully litigated numerous wage and hour, civil rights, and employment discrimination cases, including class and collective actions, before the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), New York State Division of Human Rights, and in state and federal court, securing millions of dollars in damages for her clients.

In addition, Ms. Harris regularly negotiates severance agreements on behalf of individual employees to obtain the best possible outcomes for them.

She also represents public and private sector unions in collective bargaining, as well as in proceedings before arbitrators, the National Labor Relations Board, the New York State Public Employment Relations Board, and state and federal courts.

While in law school, Ms. Harris served as a technical editor for the Harvard Law School Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Journal and wrote for the labor and employment blog OnLabor.org, drafting explainers and news articles about notable developments in labor and employment law. Ms. Harris also worked as a law clerk for Service Employees International Union at both its international office in Washington, D.C. and Local 615 in Boston, including as a Peggy Browning Fund fellow.

Before law school, Ms. Harris drafted labor arbitration awards for a labor arbitrator and served as the Project Coordinator for Stanford and Columbia Universities’ Parliamentary Scorecard Project in Kampala, Uganda.