James Harrington

JAMES C. HARRINGTON FOUNDER AND DIRECTOR EMERITUS TEXAS CIVIL RIGHTS PROJECT Jim Harrington, a human rights attorney of forty-six years, is founder and director emeritus of the Texas Civil Rights Project. He graduated from the University of Detroit law school in 1973, from where he also holds a master’s in philosophy. He was an adjunct professor at the University of Texas law school for 27 years and also taught undergraduate writing courses in civil liberties. He continues to teach in UT's international school. In 1990, Mr. Harrington founded the Texas Civil Rights Project, a statewide non-profit foundation that promotes social, racial, and economic justice and civil liberty, through the legal system and public education, for low income and poor persons. By the time of his retirement in March 2016, he had built the Project to a staff of 40 people with offices in Austin, El Paso, South Texas, Houston, Dallas, and Odessa. Mr. Harrington has handled a wide array of civil rights cases, some precedent-setting, involving grand jury discrimination, voting rights, free speech and assembly, immigration, capital punishment, police misconduct, student rights, privacy, racial and ethnic discrimination, and the rights of persons with disabilities. He is author of The Texas Bill of Rights: A Commentary and Wrestling with Free Speech, Religious Freedom, and Democracy in Turkey: The Political Trials and Times of Fethullah Gülen and co-author of Three Mystics Walk into a Tavern: A Once and Future Meeting of Rumi, Meister Eckhart, and Moses de León in Medieval Venice. Since retiring, Mr. Harrington has established Proyecto Santiago at St. James’ Episcopal Church in east Austin, which advocates for the Latino community. He has helped organize a program for two east Austin elementary schools that provides volunteer Reading Buddies for 150 children.

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