Maha Ibrahim

You want to get to know her because:

• Maha is licensed to practice in California and before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
• Prior to serving as ERA’s Founding Director of GVBH Programs, Maha was ERA’s Managing Attorney for the End Sexual Violence in Education Program, recognized as a national expert on Title IX and related laws.
• Maha brings her experience in hands-on community relations and training as a public interest lawyer through the lens of Critical Race Theory to her work as an attorney at ERA.
• She is a lead author of ERA’s school and education district, campus, and legislative law and policy models, including several large urban school district policies and administrative regulations, university board policies, and complaint investigation and resolution regulations, and California’s landmark Senate Bill 493 to help student survivors of sexual violence.
• Prior to joining ERA in 2016, Maha had 7 years of professional community organizing and policy-framing experience as a staffer in the district offices of Congresswoman Barbara Lee (2006-2009) and former State Assemblywoman Nancy Skinner (2009-2012).
• Maha has been part of the ERA legal representation for over $1.5 million+ in settlements for women working in non-traditional fields.
• Her representation of education clients has contributed to over $2 million in settlements for Title IX complainants, as well as far-reaching, multi-year programmatic monitoring and policy reform.
• Maha oversees and manages ERA’s national law clerk program and has created a model national program, with invitations to speak on ERA’s program and her approach at the Bay Area Law School Consortium CLE trainings for supervising attorneys
• Maha serves as Co-Chair of the Berkeley Law’s Berkeley Center for Comparative Equality’s (BCCE) annual international gender equity CLE conference.
• Maha has been interviewed and quoted as a legal expert on gender equity issues by the New York Times (print edition), ABC News, NBC News, the Associated Press, NPR, The Hetchinger Report, HuffPost, The Magazine of the Society of Women Engineers, the SF Chronicle, Berkeleyside, and other local publications in states across the nation.
• Maha is a member of the ABA Center for Professional Responsibility, the Impact Fund, and the California Employment Lawyers Association

Alumna of: 

• Maha is a graduate of UCLA’s Epstein Public Interest Law Program (2015) and a student in the law school’s Critical Race Studies program.
• She is a proud product of the California Community College System.  She attended Riverside Community College from 2002-2004 and served as the district’s student trustee from 2003-2004.
• Maha was named the Riverside Community College 2023 Alumni of the Year.
• Maha is a graduate of the Mills College Institute for Civic Leadership (2006 cohort).
• She is also a graduate of UC Berkeley (2006)

Outside of ERA:

• Maha was a 2026 Harvard Law Wasserstein Fellow and has been an adjunct law professor teaching Civil Ethics in Public Interest Law at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law since 2023. Maha has been a featured speaker in the “Teaching Ethics in Externships” national group seminar.
• Maha is active in numerous East Bay and National Community and Political Organizations and Nonprofits in executive board, chairwoman, and advisory board positions.
• Maha has served as a county supervisor-appointed commissioner on the Alameda County Commission on the Status of Women (2009-2012) and on the volunteer advisory committee for President Biden’s transition team on Title IX matters (2021).
• Maha is an ardent devotee of the importance of mentorships, both as a mentor and a fortunate mentee of amazing women and girls and some outstanding men.
• Outside of work, Maha is a board member of the Aurora-Mills College Children’s School (MCCS) partnership, a new private school initiative combining the 35-year-old Aurora school and the 100-year-old MCCS to continue the K-12 laboratory school model on the West Coast.
• She was a founding board member and co-director of the UCLA Law Women, an executive board member of the Journal for Islamic and Near Eastern Law, and a two-term executive board member of UCLA Law’s 40+-year-old student-founded and student-coordinated network of volunteer legal aid clinics, El Centro Legal.