Bio
Liz Morris (she/her) is Co-Director of WorkLife Law, which she leads with Co-Director Jessica Lee. For nearly three decades, WorkLife Law has built the legal protections that safeguard economic security during pregnancy and family caregiving. Under their shared leadership, the organization is deepening those protections and putting them within reach of the most marginalized workers and students, so that all people have the freedom to care for their loved ones and their own health without sacrificing their livelihoods.
Over the past decade, Liz has helped win the most significant expansion of workplace rights for pregnant and nursing workers in a generation. She coauthored WorkLife Law’s 2019 report Exposed: Discrimination Against Breastfeeding Workers, which provided the rallying cry for the PUMP for Nursing Mothers Act, and was a leader in the campaign that won its passage in 2022. She also helped lead the successful advocacy campaign for strong federal regulations implementing the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act. Liz continues to strengthen both laws by advising litigators enforcing them and training healthcare providers to help their patients use them.
Liz is a nationally recognized expert in the employment laws intersecting gender, reproductive health, and family care. Legislation she drafted with her colleagues to protect family caregivers from discrimination has become the template for bills in statehouses around the country. She has testified repeatedly as an expert witness before the California legislature, and government agencies and courts have adopted novel legal theories developed by Liz and the WorkLife Law team to expand legal rights. All of this policy advocacy is grounded in the experiences of the people who receive support on WorkLife Law’s free legal helpline, where nine out of ten callers secure the accommodations and leave they need to stay healthy and safe.
Liz has been published in numerous medical and law journals on pregnancy, breastfeeding, and work. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Harvard Business Review, and Slate, and she is regularly quoted by outlets from the Washington Post and PBS NewsHour to Ms. Magazine and Elle.
In the first part of her career, Liz represented working people in class action lawsuits challenging abusive employment practices and unions in the labor movement. She co-taught Advanced Employment Law for six years at UC Law SF. Liz is a graduate of Claremont McKenna College and received her J.D. from Stanford Law School.
Liz’s greatest achievement, challenge, and source of joy has been raising her two children with her husband.
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