Juniper Downs

Google

Senior Policy Counsel

Juniper is Senior Policy Counsel at Google, where she helps set global policy strategy for both Search and Child Safety. She joined Google in 2012, to lead content policy development for the social vertical, setting policy guidelines for issues like harassment and hate speech, and working on scalable solutions to policy enforcement.

Prior to Google, Juniper practiced law in the public sector. She began her legal career at the American Civil Liberties Union, where she practiced civil rights and civil liberties law, specializing in the representation of public school students who had been subjected to discrimination, first amendment violations or other infringements of their rights. She then went to work for the Santa Clara County Counsel Social Justice and Impact Litigation project, where she co-litigated major consumer rights cases, including a successful action against the lead paint industry and several cases against the pharmaceutical industry. In that role, Juniper was part of the core litigation team challenging Proposition 8, California’s ban on same-sex marriage. She also developed and helped pass several local ordinances, on issues ranging from childhood obesity prevention to immigrants' rights.

Juniper holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Brown and a J.D. from NYU, both magna cum laude. She is a certified mediator in New York and California. Before becoming a lawyer, Juniper was a teacher in Oakland, CA.

During law school, she mentored a juvenile offender, taught legal skills in a women’s prison and a juvenile center, and worked on a documentary project about public basketball courts, which was published in part in the New York Times.

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