Gail Heriot is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Formerly, she was a professor of law at the University of San Diego School of Law (1989 to 2025) and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2007 to 2025). 

She has written numerous articles on race, sex, and civil rights–including Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal and The Roots of Wokeness: Title VII Damage Remedies as Potential Drivers of Attitudes Toward Identity Politics and Free Expression—which have appeared in a number of law reviews.  She has also written for popular publications including the Los Angeles Times, National Review, the New Criterion, and the Wall Street Journal.

In 2021, Gail co-edited A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damage Higher Education.  Her upcoming book, Why We Walk on Eggshells:  How Our Civil Rights Laws Helped Bring About the Woke Era—and the Trump Era, Too, is expected to be published by Encounter Books in late 2026.

In addition, she was co-chair of the 1996 campaign for California’s Proposition 209, which amended the California Constitution to prohibit state-sponsored preferential treatment based on race or sex, and co-chaired of the successful “No on Proposition 16” campaign to prevent its repeal in 2020.

Gail is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, the Chairman of the Board of the American Civil Rights Project, the Executive Vice President and member of the Board of Directors of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, a member of the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars, and the Chair Emerita of the Federalist Society’s Executive Committee for the Civil Rights Practice Group. She graduated with highest distinction from Northwestern University with a B.A. in Political Science and earned her J.D. cum laude at the University of Chicago Law School where she served as an associate editor of the University of Chicago Law Review.