Kaitlin Cordes is a lawyer, human rights advocate, and the recipient of the 2009-2010 David W. Leebron Human Rights Fellowship from Columbia Law School. She currently serves as an Adviser to the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, Olivier De Schutter. Her work with Mr. De Schutter focuses on the relationship between agricultural laborers, access to land and productive resources, and the right to food. Under the auspices of the Leebron fellowship, she will spend the first half of 2010 working with the Programme on Women’s Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (PWESCR), an international advocacy and educational initiative based in Delhi, India that promotes women’s human rights.
Kaitlin Cordes’s previous human rights and public interest experience has focused on the fields of business and human rights, global labor, and economic justice. She has worked on a wide variety of human rights projects, including researching and analyzing labor issues in India; contributing to the Center for Constitutional Rights’s litigation in the Wiwa v. Shell cases and Arar v. Ashcroft; advocating for socially responsible investments of university endowments; and analyzing mining contracts entered into by the government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her public interest experience includes serving as president of the Columbia Public Interest Law Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization; interning with the Brennan Center for Justice; volunteering at The Door Legal Services; serving as an AmeriCorps Fellow with OASES; and interning with the United States Mission to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.
Kaitlin Cordes holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School, where she was a James Kent Scholar, a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, a Managing Editor of A Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual, and received both the Outstanding Public Interest Student of the Year Award and the Valentin J.T. Wertheimer Prize. After law school, she clerked for Justice Virginia A. Long of the Supreme Court of New Jersey. She holds a B.A. in political science and international studies from Northwestern University.
