Toby Merrill (she/her) joined Public Rights Project as Director of Litigation in 2025.

Toby Merrill recently served as the Biden-Harris administration’s Principal Deputy General Counsel and previously Deputy General Counsel for Postsecondary Education for the Department of Education. She led the agency lawyers who advised on issues related to higher education including student loan repayment policies, debt relief actions, Public Service Loan Forgiveness, institutional accountability and enforcement, student loan servicing and collection, bankruptcy, and borrower defense to repayment. She led the Department’s work to defend litigation challenging some of the administration’s top higher education priorities.

Prior to Toby’s federal service, she founded and directed the Project on Predatory Student Lending, where she represented student loan borrowers cheated by predatory colleges in high-impact litigation across the country. The organization began as Toby’s Skadden Fellowship project at the Legal Services Center of Harvard Law School in 2012, and has since grown to an independent non-profit that has cancelled more than $22 billion of fraudulent student loan debt.

Most recently, Toby was Of Counsel to Jacobson Lawyers Group. She has taught the Predatory Lending Clinic and Student Loan Law at Harvard Law School. She clerked in the District of Connecticut, graduated from Harvard Law School, cum laude, and from Yale College.