Tess Borden
Supervising Staff Attorney

Tess joined the Prison Law Office as a staff attorney in 2022. She works on issues related to disability accommodations in California state prisons and conditions of confinement in county jails. Before PLO, Tess was a staff attorney at the ACLU of New Jersey, where she litigated conditions of confinement and criminal legal system reform in federal and state courts and testified before the legislature on solitary confinement, prison oversight, and officer-perpetrated abuse. She was appointed by Governor Phil Murphy to serve on the Advisory Board to the New Jersey Office of Corrections Ombudsperson, an independent oversight entity, and on the Inter-Agency Working Group on Body Worn Cameras. Tess has also worked for the ACLU National Office, Human Rights Watch in New York and Dakar, Senegal, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands, as well as spending time before law school as an immigration paralegal. Throughout law school, she served as researcher to the late Christof Heyns, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. Tess received her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School in 2014 and her B.A. from Yale College and clerked for the Honorable George A. O’Toole, Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. She is admitted to the New York Bar and is registered by the State Bar of California as a Registered Legal Aid Attorney.