Kelsey Jost-Creegan is Acting Director and Lecturer in Law at the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic. Her work centers on developing transnational movement lawyering strategies in partnership with rural Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and artisanal fishing and farming communities in the Americas to defend territorial rights and self-determination. She supports community-led strategies pursuing climate and environmental justice, corporate accountability, and protection for land and environmental defenders. Her advocacy spans litigation and non-litigation strategies before the Inter-American system, U.S. courts, and the United Nations.

Kelsey’s scholarship focuses on how legal systems mediate struggles over territory, extractivism, and self-determination. She examines how secondary rules governing procedure and transparency structure power, accountability, and access to justice in the global economy. Her work explores corporate and international financial institution accountability; violence against land and environmental defenders and the movements they represent; extractivism, militarization, and paramilitarization; transitional justice; and climate and environmental justice. She is particularly interested in how jurisdictional design and secrecy regimes allocate or foreclose access to remedies in transnational disputes. Methodologically, her work integrates participatory and critical approaches to human rights practice with analysis of the political ecology and legal geography of extractive enclaves in Latin America.

Previously, Kelsey was a staff attorney at EarthRights International, where she worked on transnational corporate accountability litigation. She has contributed to cases including Doe v. Chiquita Brands International (concerning Chiquita’s financing of Colombian paramilitary organizations; the first bellwether trial in the case resulted in a $38.3 million verdict for plaintiffs); Juana Doe v. International Finance Corporation (the first case in which a World Bank Group institution provided a remedy pursuant to a U.S. litigation settlement); and Mamani v. Sánchez de Lozada & Sánchez Berzaín (litigation against the former President and Minister of Defense of Bolivia that resulted in a $10 million jury verdict for plaintiffs and was ultimately resolved through settlement). In addition to litigation, she has designed and implemented strategies of accompaniment, advocacy, and protection for land and environmental defenders facing criminalization and violence.

Kelsey is fluent in Spanish and has working proficiency in Portuguese and French. She received her B.A. in Global Studies and Romance Languages from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar, and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. During law school, she spent a semester at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia.