Who we are
Jenny Huang founded Justice First in 2005 as a unique law practice dedicated to public interest law and focused on serving underprivileged communities. Jenny has over 25 years of experience in civil rights law and her areas of practice include prisoner rights litigation, employment discrimination on behalf of workers, and indigent appellate criminal defense. She is licensed to practice in California and New York and litigates primarily in federal court.
Jenny has dedicated her entire legal career to public interest law. Before starting her own law firm, Jenny worked as a Staff Attorney at Public Advocates, Inc. a non-profit law firm and advocacy organization in San Francisco. She worked there on statewide impact litigation in the areas of educational equity, employment discrimination, community economic development, and transportation equity. She was also an associate for Koob & Magoolaghan, a plaintiff’s civil rights law firm in Manhattan, where she litigated cases in the areas of prisoners’ rights, employment discrimination, and constitutional law.
Jenny Huang
Attorney
Throughout her legal career, Jenny has mentored students interested in public interest lawyering. She supervised the legal internship programs at Koob & Magoolaghan and at Public Advocates, Inc. In 2008, Harvard Law School awarded her the Wasserstein Public Interest Fellowship, giving her the opportunity to advise Harvard law students about public service legal careers. At Justice First, Jenny founded and supervised the internship and fellowship programs, designed to give meaningful experience and inspiration to students and new attorneys committed to pursuing a legal career in public service. From 2018-2021, Jenny taught as an adjunct professor at Golden Gate University School of Law, nationally recognized as one of the most diverse law schools in the country.
Jenny graduated from New York University School of Law in 1996 and was awarded the Moncrieffe Convocation Award for Outstanding Achievement in Racism & the Law. She served as a judicial clerk for the Supreme Court of Minnesota, followed by a federal clerkship with the Honorable Michael Davis in the District of Minnesota.
Aside from her law practice, Jenny is actively engaged in community service. She serves on a Legislative working group to address sexual assault in prison, she organized fundraising and school events for a Mandarin immersion charter school in Oakland, helped to improve diversity among judges by serving on the Judiciary Appointments Committee for the Alameda County Bar Association and the Asian American Bar Association, and she served as co-chair for the Bay Area Chapter of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum.
In her personal life, Jenny is a fanatic inline and quad dance skater, she enjoys the outdoors, and loves to travel.
Yashna Eswaran
Yashna is Spring Legal Intern with Justice First and a third-year law student at Northeastern University School of Law. As a Public Interest Law Scholar at Northeastern, Yashna has dedicated herself to the prison abolition movement through combatting systemic injustices. During her time at Northeastern, Yashna has worked in and learned from various legal settings across the country. Yashna researched and worked on innocence cases at the New England Innocence Project in Boston, MA; challenged death row convictions at the Capital Appeals Project in New Orleans, LA; worked on prisoners’ rights litigation at Loevy & Loevy in Chicago, IL; and is working in indigent defense at the Alameda County Public Defenders’ Office in Dublin, CA. Yashna has also been a student attorney in both Northeastern’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic and Prisoners’ Rights Clinic. Before law school, Yashna worked as a paralegal at the Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center.