Jonathan F. Harris is a nationally recognized expert in labor and employment law, contracts, and workforce development. His publications have appeared or are forthcoming in the Georgetown Law Journal, California Law Review, Alabama Law Review, Comparative Labor Law and Policy Journal, Harvard Law Review Blog, California Law Review Online, Northwestern University Law Review Online, and New York City Law Review. His article, Consumer Law as Work Law, 112 Calif. L. Rev. 1 (2024), was selected for the Harvard/Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum. A prior article, Unconscionability in Contracting for Worker Training, brought national attention to Training Repayment Agreement Provisions (TRAPs) that require workers to pay to quit and are used as workarounds to non-competes. He is a senior fellow with the Student Borrower Protection Center and a past grantee of the University of California Student Loan Law Initiative.
Professor Harris is a peer-review referee for the Yale Law Journal. His writing has been cited by federal entities including the FTC in its rule banning non-competes, the CFPB, and the Senate Banking Committee. Major news outlets have quoted Professor Harris, including the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, and Washington Post.
Before joining the Temple faculty, Professor Harris was an associate professor at Loyola Law School Los Angeles and an acting assistant professor of lawyering at NYU School of Law. He is the immediate past chair of the AALS Section on Labor Relations and Employment Law, as well as an executive committee member of the AALS Section on Employment Discrimination Law. He was a co-organizer of the Michael A. Olivas Writing Institute and is a member of the Mexican American Bar Association. Professor Harris clerked for Judge James E. Graves, Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit while teaching at Mississippi College School of Law. He began his legal career as a Skadden Fellow, focusing on the intersections of employment and consumer law. Prior to that, he was a labor and community organizer.