Kelsey Jost-Creegan is a Lecturer-in-Law and the Deputy Director and Senior Supervising Staff Attorney at the Smith Family Human Rights Clinic. At the clinic, she supervises the Land, Sovereignty, and Environmental Defense Advocacy Initiative and co-supervises an advocacy initiative on ending fossil fuel use with Clinic Director Sarah Knuckey. Her areas of advocacy and academic research include: corporate accountability; the right to development; rights of Indigenous, Afro-descendent, Black, and small-farming (campesino) communities in Latin America; decolonial ecology; environmental and climate justice; the right to a healthy environment; the right to protection the right to defend rights, and the protection of land and environmental defenders and social movements from retaliatory violence; strategies to combat criminalization and stigmatization of human rights defenders; corporate accountability in conflict settings and in the climate crisis; and law and rurality; transnational tort litigation in U.S. courts; advocacy strategies in the Inter-American Systems; the intersection of international trade and investment law and international human rights law. With partners, in her work and in her research, Kelsey seeks to collaboratively build models of transnational movement lawyering and integrate participatory methodologies into human rights lawyering. 

Previously, Kelsey was a staff attorney at EarthRights International, where she worked on civil tort litigation for transnational corporate accountability. She worked on cases such as Doe v. Chiquita Brands, International, a case against the Chiquita Brands for financing the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia paramilitary group in Colombia. In addition, she designed and implemented strategies of accompaniment, advocacy, and protection in support of land and environmental defenders facing persecution. Previously, Kelsey was a member of the litigation team on Mamani v. Sánchez de Lozada & Sánchez Berzaín, a suit against the former President and Minister of Defense of Bolivia that resulted in the first civil jury trial against a former head of state and a $10 million jury verdict for plaintiffs.