Sylvia Torres-Guillén
Senior Special Counsel, Public Counsel
Sylvia graduated from Harvard University and earned her law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Sylvia is Special Senior Counsel at Public Counsel.
A fearless and tenacious trial lawyer, Sylvia spent decades fighting for civil rights and racial, social, environmental, and economic justice. As a federal public defender for nearly 20 years, the State’s first Latina General Counsel of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Board, ACLU of Southern California’s Statewide Director of Education Equity, President and Director of Litigation at the Disability Rights Legal Center, and now at Public Counsel, she has been fighting for the most marginalized and oppressed communities, achieving exceptional results in numerous federal and state courts. She has had 40 trials in federal court and, in two cases alone, she successfully obtained settlements totaling over $175 million dollars.
She has served as President of the Latina Lawyers Bar Association, Vice-President of the Mexican American Bar Foundation, and co-chair of the Hispanic National Bar Association’s Commission on the Status of Latinas in the Legal Profession. She has received the Los Angeles and San Francisco Daily Journal’s California Lawyer Attorneys of the Year (“CLAY”) award, the Latina Lawyers Bar Association Luminarias Award, the State Bar of California’s Ronald M. George Public Lawyer of the Year Award, President’s Award by the Ventura County Mexican American Bar Association Education Foundation, the Mexican American Bar Association’s Benito Juarez Attorney of the Year Award, the California Rural Legal Assistance Community Leadership Award, and the Los Angeles Business Journal’s “Leaders of Influence: Minority Attorneys.” Sylvia was also selected as Harvard Law School’s Wasserstein Public Interest Fellow in 2019-2020, the Rockwood Leadership Institute as a 2019 Lead Now California Fellow, and as a One Justice Executive Executive Fellow in 2025-2026.
Sylvia is the proud mother of her two treasured daughters, Chloe and Gabby.
