Katie Redford

Today Redford and her team at ERI use the Unocal case as a model to fight corporate misbehavior. Working in partnership with other legal organizations and private lawyers, they seeks to remedy abuses of earth rights—all over the world. For instance, Redford and ERI are currently working with the victims of human rights abuses associated with the activities of the oil company Chevron in Nigeria to fight the case against Chevron in federal court in San Francisco.

In the landmark settlement, the company agreed to compensate the Burmese villagers who sued the firm for complicity in forced labor, rape, and murder. By combining human rights law and environmental law, ERI had come up with a new and untested strategy that succeeded where older solutions had failed. Their story was documented in the 2006 documentary film Total Denial.

As the years passed, the case gained traction. Redford trudged forward, putting in countless hours of legal work, fundraising and research, and building coalitions with likeminded organizations such as Center for Constitutional Rights. After several years of fighting an uphill battle without losing hope, the rewards finally came, in 2004. Unocal agreed to settle the lawsuit. It was the first time in history that a major multinational corporation had settled a case of this type for monetary damages.

ERI brought the case of John Doe I, et al. v. Unocal Corp., et al., to both state and federal courts in California. Most legal experts believed the case would never fly and at first it appeared they may be right. But seeing possibilities where the experts could not, Redford persevered throughout the protracted, ten-year-long legal battle. ERI had their case dismissed in 2000, fought back and won by appeal, the right to continue.

In November 1996, Redford and Ka Hsaw Wa were married in a Thai village; they honeymooned in Phuket. The following October, she filed Doe v. Unocal, and in March 1997 it became the first case in which jurisdiction was granted over a corporation for human rights abuses overseas. This case was documented in the 2006 film Total Denial.

Redford is a graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law (UVA), where she received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights and Public Service. She is a member of the Massachusetts State Bar and served as counsel to plaintiffs in ERI's landmark case Doe v. Unocal. Redford received an Echoing Green Fellowship in 1995 to establish ERI, and since that time has split her time between ERI's Thailand and US offices. In addition to working on ERI's litigation and teaching at the EarthRights Schools, Redford currently serves as an adjunct professor of law at both UVA and the Washington College of Law at American University. She has published on various issues associated with human rights and corporate accountability, in addition to co-authoring ERI reports such as In Our Court, Shock and Law, and Total Denial Continues. In 2006, Redford was selected as an Ashoka Global Fellow.

In 1995 Redford received seed money from Echoing Green to launch EarthRights International (ERI) with Tyler Giannini and Ka Hsaw Wa. ERI began its work with offices in Thailand and Washington, D.C., as a nonprofit organization that works at the intersection of human rights and the environment—which it defines as "earth rights"—by documenting abuses, mounting legal actions against the perpetrators of earth rights abuses, providing training for grassroots and community leaders, and launching advocacy campaigns.

Her third year, she did an independent research project on the Alien Torts Claims Act and Unocal's role in the Burmese pipeline, the paper that earned her an A. She also wrote a grant proposal to start EarthRights International, a nonprofit human rights organization. The day after she took the bar examination, in 1995, she returned to Thailand to live and run the newly formed group with Ka Hsaw Wa and a fellow law school graduate.

In 1994 Redford turned in a law school paper suggesting the use of an ancient federal statute to fight human rights abuses in Burma, The Alien Torts Claims Act. The act dates back to 1789, when George Washington signed the fledgling nation's first Judiciary Act. An obscure provision in it appears to give foreigners the right to sue in federal court over violations of international law. Though the act has been used to sue individuals, it has never been used successfully to sue a corporation for human rights abuses. Her professor gave her an A but warned that such a case would never occur. That student paper, "Using the Alien Torts Claims Act: Unocal v. Burma," became the basis of the groundbreaking case John Doe I, et al. v. Unocal Corp., et al. In March 1997 it became the first case in which jurisdiction was granted over a corporation for human rights abuses overseas. Unocal eventually settled the case out of court.

She headed home and in the fall of 1992, Redford enrolled at the University of Virginia Law School to study human rights and environmental law but as soon as school was out for the summer, she left again for Thailand. This time she went as an intern for Human Rights Watch, documenting abuses associated with forced labor. She returned to the same refugee camp to live with the same Burmese family she had stayed with the summer before. The father, a pro-democracy activist, arranged to sneak her into Burma. (The military, which staged a coup in 1988, officially changed the country's name to Myanmar the following year.)

After graduating from college in 1990, Redford signed on with the WorldTeach program and found herself teaching English in a village on the Thai-Burmese border.

Katharine "Katie" Redford (born March 7, 1978) is an American human rights lawyer and activist who is credited with spearheading a movement to hold international companies accountable for overseas abuse in their home court jurisdictions in the Western world, and in doing so, opened up new possibilities in human rights law. Along with her husband, Burmese human rights activist Ka Hsaw Wa, she is the co-founder and US Office Director of EarthRights International (ERI), a non-profit group of activists, organizers, and lawyers with expertise in human rights, the environment, and corporate/government accountability.

Born on March 7, 1968, she was raised in Wellesley, MA and in 1986 she graduated from Wellesley High School. Redford attended Colgate University in rural upstate New York where she was a member of the swimming and diving teams. She found spending six hours a day in the water too much and later quit and began playing rugby, a Division I sport at Colgate.