Human Rights Fireside Chat with Housing Advocate Eric Tars

Join us for our weekly Human Rights Fireside Chat series with Eric Tars, who serves as the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty’s legal director. Eric leads the organiation's human rights, civil rights, and children’s rights programs and managing its cutting edge litigation, strategic policy advocacy, and outreach and training initiatives at the international, national, and local levels. Eric helped spearhead the launch of the Law Center’s national Housing Not Handcuffs campaign and has served as counsel of record in multiple precedent-setting cases, including Martin v. Boise in the 9th Circuit. Before coming to the Law Center, Eric was a Fellow with Global Rights’ U.S. Racial Discrimination Program and consulted with Columbia University Law School’s Human Rights Institute and the US Human Rights Network, where he currently serves as the vice-chair of the Network’s Board.

Eric received his J.D. magna cum laude as a Global Law Scholar at the Georgetown University Law Center. He received his B.A. magna cum laude in political science from Haverford College and studied international human rights in Vienna at the Institute for European Studies and at the University of Vienna.

Eric will discuss his experiences launching the Housing Not Handcuffs campaign to stop the criminalization of homelessness and to push for effective housing policies that end homelessness, as well as his involvement in the recent introduction of a first-in-the-nation California bill that would amend the state constitution to recognize the human right to housing.