Our Team
Ethan Morales
Ethan was born in southern California and raised in San Bernardino County. He first moved to the Bay Area in 2018, when he began studying at the University of California — Berkeley. There, he fell in love with the Bay, and the city of San Francisco. He graduated from Berkeley in 2022 magna cum laude (High Distinction) with a degree in Political Science. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Alpha of California. After Berkeley, he joined the Harvard Law School class of 2025.
In 2024, Ethan worked at the San Francisco office of Kirkland & Ellis, the largest law firm in the world by revenue. There, he worked on complex financial litigation involving clients in the Bay Area. In 2023, Ethan worked in the California Department of Justice, Special Prosecutions Section, where he specialized in organized retail theft and political corruption. From 2019-2020, Ethan worked in the Superior Court of California, City and County of San Francisco, in the JusticeCorps ACCESS center free legal aid clinic.
While at Harvard, Ethan worked in the United States Department of Justice, in the office of the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts. There, he served in the Organized Crime and Gang Strike Force Unit. He also worked as part of the Harvard LGBTQ+ Advocacy Clinic, and was a Managing Articles Editor for Harvard Law and Policy Review, the Executive Submissions Editor for the Harvard Human Rights Journal, and a Symposium Editor for the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. In spring 2025, Ethan worked as part of the Legal Policy team within the ACLU of Northern California’s Technology & Civil Liberties Program.
While at Berkeley, he wrote for Berkeley Political Review, competed as part of UC Berkeley Model United Nations, helped teach two courses in the Interdisciplinary Studies Department, contributed to research on security institutions and violent instability, and worked at the Berkeley APEC Study Center researching the evolution and structure of international regulatory regimes. He also published original work with Oxford University Press on the law and politics of space settlements.
Ethan adores San Francisco. He knows its layout like the back of his hand and its obscure historical points by memory. He is dedicated to making San Francisco the place he knows it can be.
Matthew Chakov
Matt was born and raised in New Jersey until he moved to Washington, D.C. and then Ithaca, NY for college. It was living in these cities that he first became interested in housing policy and zoning. He graduated from Cornell University in 2020 with a degree in Industrial and Labor Relations.
Before joining Harvard Law School’s class of 2025, Matt worked at PricewaterhouseCoopers as a management consultant and later worked for the federal government at the Small Business Administration as a paralegal specialist.
In law school, Matt worked at the Supreme Court of the United States in the Office of the Legal Counsel. He then interned in the White House Counsel’s Office where he had the opportunity to work on issues relating to presidential authority, foreign affairs, administrative, environmental, immigration, clemency, separation of powers, tax, and appellate law. He also interned at the Department of Defense in their Office of the General Counsel where he worked on civil litigation and government transparency. Matt summered at Boies Schiller Flexner LLP in summer of 2024 where he worked on a variety of different types of complex litigation, including on major class actions and prominent antitrust suits.
At Harvard, Matt has worked on the Harvard National Security Journal, the Harvard Law and Policy Review, and the Harvard Journal of Sports & Entertainment Law. He has also researched congressional oversight for Perry Apelbaum and state, local, and zoning law for Professor Maureen Brady.
Matt’s experience living in cities throughout the U.S. and research into local and zoning law have fueled his passion for creating a vibrant university in downtown San Francisco, envisioning it as a hub that would not only attract students but also invigorate the area’s economy and foster a thriving community.