Victoria Adelmant is a research scholar at the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law. Her research centers around the rights of people living in poverty, focusing particularly on climate change and the digitalization of government. Victoria previously worked for the Oak Foundation, Minority Rights Group International, the United Nations, and the Academy of European Law. She has also taught schoolchildren about climate change and campaigned with Oxfam. In 2019–20, Victoria was a Hauser Global Scholar and a Human Rights Scholar at New York University. She also holds an LLM (summa cum laude) from the London School of Economics and a first class law degree from the University of Oxford.

Philip Alston is the John Norton Pomeroy Professor at New York University School of Law. From 2014 to 2020, he was the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights.

Juan Auz is an Ecuadorian lawyer and a PhD candidate at the Hertie School’s Center for Fundamental Rights in Berlin. Before this, he was an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). His research focuses on the nexus between human rights and climate change law, particularly in Latin America. Juan previously worked for several years in Ecuador on Indigenous peoples’ rights in Amazonia as the co-founder of Terra Mater and executive director of Fundación Pachamama. He holds an LLB from the Universidad de las Americas in Quito and an LLM in Global Environmental Law from the University of Edinburgh. Juan is a member, among other organizations, of IUCN’s World Commission on Environmental Law.

Violeta Barrera holds a Law and Sociology BA from the University of Warwick, and an MA in Legal and Political Theory at University College London. Her master’s thesis explores the role of deeply held convictions in a liberal state. Violeta has worked in Oxfam GB’s legal team in Oxford as a paralegal since 2015.

Ben Batros is an international law practitioner focused on the intersection of climate change, human rights, and accountability. He has eighteen years of experience pursuing accountability for human rights violations and international crimes, including conducting strategic human rights litigation with the Open Society Justice Initiative, serving as appeals counsel in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and working on regional cooperation to combat transnational crime for the Australian Attorney-General’s Department. For the past four years, Ben has used this experience to explore how law and strategic litigation can best support climate action. He is currently a director at Strategy for Humanity and legal advisor at the Center for Climate Crime Analysis.

Matthew Blainey specializes in human rights, climate change, and strategic litigation. He is a fellow at Just Atonement, where he is developing and implementing its climate litigation strategy. Previously, Matthew served as a judicial law clerk and was a lawyer and senior associate in the litigation departments of two preeminent international law firms, where he worked on complex litigation and provided pro bono advice to Indigenous communities and women at risk of homelessness. Matthew holds an LLM in International Legal Studies from NYU School of Law, as well as a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and a Bachelor of International Relations from La Trobe University. He is admitted to legal practice in Australia and is applying for admission in New York.

Michael Burger is the executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and a Senior Research Scholar at Columbia Law School. His research and advocacy focus on legal strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and promote climate change adaptation through pollution control, resource management, land use planning, and green finance. He is the editor of two recent books: Combating Climate Change with Section 115 of the Clean Air Act: Law and Policy Rationales (2020) and Climate Change, Public Health and the Law (2018). He is also Of Counsel at the environmental law firm Sher Edling LLP. He is a graduate of Columbia Law School and Brown University and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Creative Writing program at NYU.

Paul Kingsley Clark is a barrister, practicing from Garden Court Chambers, London, and a co-founder of the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN). He specializes in public, civil, and international law, with a focus on social justice. His international work includes advising and representing states in inter-state proceedings and representing defendants and states in pre-trial, trial, and appeal proceedings before the International Criminal Court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, and the Special Court for Sierra Leone. His domestic practice includes judicial review, private law, inquests, and inquiries, across a range of areas including prisons, criminal justice, trafficking, discrimination, and mental health.

Reinhold Gallmetzer is an appeals counsel at the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. He is also the founder and chairperson of the Board of Directors of the Center for Climate Crime Analysis, a non-profit organization of prosecutors and law enforcement experts established to support and scale up judicial climate action (see www.climatecrimeanalysis.org). Previously, Mr. Gallmetzer served, among other things, as a legal officer at the UN War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and as a judicial training officer with the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Mr. Gallmetzer studied law in Innsbruck (Austria), Padova (Italy), and Glasgow (Scotland).

Siri Gloppen is Professor of Government at the University of Bergen, Norway and director of LawTransform (the CMI-UiB Centre on Law & Social Transformation), a global center for the study of the role of law and legal institutions in social change. Gloppen is also the co-director of the Bergen School of Global Studies. Her core research area is the use of law and courts as strategies and arenas for social change (lawfare), including in areas such as climate change, sexual and reproductive rights, the right to health elections, and democratic governance. She has led and participated in numerous international research projects in these fields, including “Climate Change Discourses, Rights and the Poor,” “Climate Crossroads,” and “PluriLand Theorizing Conflict and Contestation in Plural Land Rights Regimes.”

James A. Goldston is the executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative. A leading practitioner of international human rights and criminal law, Goldston has litigated leading cases before the European Court of Human Rights and United Nations treaty bodies. Goldston previously served as coordinator of prosecutions in the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, as legal director of the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Centre, as director general for human rights at the Mission to Bosnia-Herzegovina of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, and as assistant United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, where he focused on organized crime. Goldston is an adjunct professor of law at NYU School of Law.

Laura Gyte is a public interest litigator, specializing in climate litigation and campaigns legal strategy. At the time of writing, Laura was senior legal advisor at Oxfam. She is now special counsel at FILE Foundation and a co-founding director at Rights: Community: Action. Laura has worked for fifteen years as a legal advisor to NGOs and governments in the Global North and South. She holds a degree in law from the University of Oxford and studied comparative human rights law at the University of Konstanz, Germany.

Richard Heede leads the Climate Accountability Institute’s (CAI) “Carbon Majors” initiative that attributes emissions to the largest fossil fuel companies that produce and market carbon fuels worldwide. He and his colleagues modeled the CO₂, temperature, sea level rise, and ocean acidification traced to major carbon producers. Richard investigates how oil and gas companies can align production and investment with (and correct perverse incentives with respect to) the ≤1.5°C pathway. He founded CAI in 2011 to use science to leverage climate stewardship, following the arc of his 1983 NCAR thesis A Geography of Carbon, his energy and climate work with the Rocky Mountain Institute from 1984 to 2001, and his municipal and corporate inventories with Climate Mitigation Services from 2001 to 2011. He designed and built his low-carbon home at 2,300 meters in the Rocky Mountains.

Sam Hunter Jones is qualified as a solicitor in England and Wales. Alongside acting in an individual capacity for the claimants in the Torres Strait climate case, Sam is an in-house lawyer at the environmental law charity ClientEarth, where his work focuses on public interest climate litigation. He holds an LLM in environmental law and policy from University College London, where he was awarded the Maxi Alexander prize for research. Before ClientEarth, Sam practiced as an international disputes lawyer at the law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, where he led a number of pro bono initiatives relating to human rights.

Michelle Jonker-Argueta is acting senior legal counsel for Strategic Litigation at Greenpeace International. She advises campaigns on the development and implementation of strategic litigation to hold governments and corporations accountable for climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as the resulting human rights violations. Prior to joining Greenpeace International, Michelle worked in international human rights law and international criminal law in prosecution and appeals. She also has experience in the private sector on EU competition law. Michelle is an attorney registered with the New York State Bar and holds a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School. She is also a Dutch Lawyer.

Ashfaq Khalfan is a researcher/advisor on obligations beyond borders and as Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Policy Coordinator, focusing on the legal enforcement of rights. He previously led the Right to Water Programme at the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions. His published work has covered a range of topics, including extraterritorial human rights obligations, human rights change strategies, sustainable development law, and the rights to water and sanitation. He has a doctoral degree in law from Oxford University and degrees in common and civil law and political science and international development from McGill University. He was a founding director of the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law and now chairs its board.

Tessa Khan is an international climate change and human rights lawyer and advocate. She is the founder and director of Uplift, which supports a just transition away from fossil fuel production in the United Kingdom. Previously, she was co-founder and co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, a project of the Urgenda Foundation. She has supported grassroots, regional, and international movements for justice and has served as an expert advisor to UN human rights bodies and governments, while working in Thailand, Egypt, India, the United States, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Australia. She has BA and LLB (Hons) from the University of Western Australia and a BCL (Dist.) from the University of Oxford. She is a regular commentator in the United Kingdom and international media.

Arpitha Kodiveri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Climate Litigation Accelerator (CLX) at NYU Law. She received her doctoral degree from the European University Institute as a Hans Kelsen Fellow, where her research examined land conflicts in India’s forests. She previously worked as an environmental lawyer supporting forest-dwelling communities. She has an LLM from UC Berkeley and a BSL LLB from ILS College, Pune.

Jolene Lin is associate professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore and director of the Asia Pacific Centre for Environmental Law. Her research interests are transnational environmental and climate change law and climate litigation. She is the author of Governing Climate Change: Global Cities and Transnational Lawmaking (2017) and, with Jacqueline Peel, is co-authoring a book on Global South climate litigation.

Gerry Liston is a qualified solicitor (Ireland), a PhD candidate at the Irish Centre for Human Rights, and a legal officer with the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), the organization instructing counsel on behalf of the Portuguese youth-applicants in their case against thirty-three European countries before the European Court of Human Rights.

Gabriel Mantelli is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy and Legal Theory at the Faculty of Law at the University of São Paulo (USP). He holds a Master’s of Law and Development from São Paulo Law School and completed a visiting research period at Kent Law School (University of Kent, United Kingdom). Gabriel is currently a human rights and environmental lawyer. He is also a law professor at São Judas University (USJT) and coordinates its Human Rights Clinic as well as the Center for Law and Decolonization. Based in São Paulo, Brazil, he is an officer within the Protection of Socioenvironmental Rights program at Conectas Human Rights.

Sophie Marjanac is the climate accountability lead at ClientEarth. Her work focuses on strategic litigation and other legal interventions to drive governments and companies towards reducing their emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. She is acting for the claimants in the Torres Strait climate case in an individual capacity. Before ClientEarth, Sophie was a senior lawyer in the environment and planning law practice of the Australian law firm, Clayton Utz. She also previously worked in Indigenous land rights in the remote Torres Strait region. Sophie is qualified as a solicitor in the State of Victoria, Australia. She has a Bachelor of Laws with First Class Honors and a Bachelor of International Studies with Distinction from the University of New South Wales.

Kelly Matheson is a human rights lawyer and award-winning filmmaker who spent the last 15 years working at WITNESS, an international human rights organization that specializes in using video and technology to defend human rights. As a human rights lawyer and filmmaker, she specialized in the use of video evidence in environmental human rights and international criminal justice investigations and proceedings. Kelly now serves as the Deputy Director of Global Climate Litigation for Our Children’s Trust, a non-profit public interest law firm that provides strategic, campaign-based legal services to youth from diverse backgrounds to secure their legal rights to a safe climate.

Daniel J. Metzger is a climate law fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. His work focuses on climate change litigation, including research on litigation risk, international law, and the law and science of climate change attribution. Daniel earned his JD from Vanderbilt Law School and a master’s degree in natural resource management from Iceland’s University Centre of the Westfjords.

Waqqas Ahmad Mir is a practicing lawyer based in Lahore and a partner at Axis Law Chambers. His litigation practice primarily focuses on constitutional, antitrust, taxation, and commercial law. Waqqas also appears in matters relating to environmental law as well as animals’ rights. He has been appointed as amicus curiae on three different occasions by the Lahore High Court in matters relating to taxation, energy, constitutional interpretation, the environment, and local government. Waqqas was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 2007 and is also a graduate of Harvard Law School, which he attended on a Fulbright scholarship.

Pooven Moodley is a human rights lawyer and social justice activist from South Africa. He is currently the executive director of Natural Justice, an organization of lawyers for the community and the environment. Before joining Natural Justice, he was the associate country director of Oxfam GB in South Africa and the global head of campaigning for ActionAid International. He has worked extensively in over twenty countries, starting with the anti-apartheid movement. Pooven has also campaigned with a range of communities and activists from the local to the global levels on issues around the environment, land, extractives, basic services, and the climate and planetary crisis. He is the ICCA Consortium co-chair of the “Defending the Territories of Life” stream of work.

Julia Mello Neiva is pursuing a PhD in Human Rights at the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo (USP). She holds a Master of Human Rights (LLM) from Columbia Law School (Columbia University, New York) and is a human rights specialist for the Faculty of Law of the University of São Paulo (USP). Based in São Paulo, Brazil, she is the coordinator of the Protection of Socioenvironmental Rights program at Conectas Human Rights. She is a lawyer and human rights activist. She worked for many years as a representative and senior researcher at the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre and for other NGOs and academic institutions.

Jacqueline Peel is a professor at Melbourne Law School and director of Melbourne Climate Futures. She is an expert in environmental and climate law and climate litigation. She has published widely on this topic, including Climate Change Litigation: Regulatory Pathways to Cleaner Energy (with Hari Osofsky) and, with Jolene Lin, is co-authoring a book on Global South climate litigation.

César Rodríguez-Garavito is a professor of clinical law and chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. He is the founding director of the Earth Rights Advocacy (ERA) Clinic and the Climate Litigation Accelerator (CLX) at NYU Law. César is also the editor-in-chief of Open Global Rights. He has been a visiting professor at Stanford, Brown, the University of Melbourne, the European University Institute, the University of Pretoria, the Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil), and the Andean University of Quito. He has published widely on global governance, international human rights, climate litigation, Indigenous rights, socioenvironmental conflicts, and business and human rights. César has also served as an expert witness of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an adjunct judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, and a lead litigator in climate change, socioeconomic rights, and Indigenous rights cases.

Joana Setzer is an assistant professorial research fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where she leads the Climate Change Laws of the World project – the most comprehensive global resource on climate legislation and litigation. Joana was a British Academy post-doctoral fellow. She holds a PhD and an MSc from LSE and a Masters and a BA in Law from the University of São Paulo. Prior to moving to the United Kingdom, she worked as an environmental lawyer in Brazil. Joana regularly advises a range of international, governmental, and nongovernmental organizations. She has authored over thirty peer-reviewed papers and book chapters.

Lucy Singer is an intellectual property solicitor working for Gowling WLG LLP in their London office. Lucy has a keen interest in sustainability and undertook a six-month secondment to the legal team at Oxfam, where she was fortunate to become involved with this project.

Catalina Vallejo Catalina Vallejo is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen School of Law for the project “Causes and Consequences of the Legal Architecture of Climate Politics” (2020–23). She is affiliated to LawTransform in Norway and is country-case researcher for the project “Riverine Rights: Exploring the Currents and Consequences of Legal Innovations on the Rights of Rivers in Colombia, New Zealand, and India” funded by the Research Council of Norway (2020–24). She holds a Ph.D. in Law from Los Andes University, Bogota, an MA in Peace & Conflict studies from Innsbruck University, a degree in Law from UNAULA and a posgraduate degree in Administrative Law from Universidad de Antioquia, both in Colombia. Her doctoral dissertation was devoted to climate change litigation and emerging climate jurisprudence in cases involving State parties.

Lisa Vanhala is Professor of Political Science at University College London. She is the principal investigator on a European Research Council Starting Grant on the Politics of Climate Change Loss and Damage (CCLAD, grant number 755753) and has a long-standing interest in environment-related legal mobilization. Her work on climate change litigation and climate change loss and damage has been published in Global Environmental Change, WIRES Climate Change, Global Environmental Politics, Environmental Politics, and Law & Policy.

Jessica Wentz is a non-resident senior fellow at Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. Her work has spanned a variety of topics related to climate change mitigation and adaptation. Much of her research focuses on the role of climate science in litigation, environmental impact assessment, and natural resource management. Jessica previously worked as a visiting associate professor and environmental program fellow at the George Washington University Law School, where she received an LLM in Energy and Environmental law. She also has a JD from Columbia Law School and a BA in international development from the University of California, Los Angeles.