Hon. Gail L. Heriot

Gail Heriot is a recently retired law professor from the University of San Diego. She also served as a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights from 2007 to 2025.  She is also the chairman of the board of the American Civil Rights Project and the chair emerita of the Civil Rights practice group at the Federalist Society for Law & Public Policy.

Professor Heriot is a prolific writer in the area of civil rights.  She is the author of  many law review articles.  She is also the editor (along with Maimon Schwarzschild) of the 2021 anthology, A Dubious Expediency:  How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education. Her upcoming book is entitled, Why We Walk on Eggshell:  How Our Civil Rights Laws Helped Bring About the Woke Era—And the Trump Era, Too.

Her writings for a general audience have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the San Diego Union-Tribune, the National Review and many other newspapers and magazines.

In 1996, she co-chaired the successful  “Yes on Proposition 209” campaign, which amended the California Constitution to prohibit state-sponsored discrimination or preferential treatment based on race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.  In 2020, she co-chaired the “No on Proposition 16” campaign, which successfully prevented Proposition 209’s repeal.