Jacob Kopas is a Senior Attorney on the International Program Team, where he coordinates efforts in Latin America to end reliance on fossil fuels and to promote a just and equitable energy transition. Jacob supports partners in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Argentina fighting the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure, large-scale coal mining, and the use of fracking for oil and gas extraction. He also works to advance the human right to a healthy environment before the Inter-American System of Human Rights. Jacob is based in New York.

Jacob has spent over nine years living and working in Latin America, including time in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Peru. Prior to joining Earthjustice, he worked four years as an attorney with the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), helping to coordinate their Human Rights and the Environment program out of AIDA’s office in Bogotá, Colombia. Jacob contributed to AIDA’s litigation before international human rights bodies such as the Inter-American Commission and Court of Human Rights, as well as legal advocacy protecting the rights of indigenous and campesino communities struggling against mining, large dams, and other extractive industries or large infrastructure projects. He also worked two years with a human rights NGO, the Comisión Intereclesial de Justicia y Paz in Colombia, supporting indigenous, afro-descendant, and campesino communities resisting displacement in the face of armed conflict and extractive projects.

Jacob graduated from Harvard Law School in 2007, where he worked extensively in the Harvard Human Rights Clinic on issues related to indigenous people’s rights, criminal justice reform, and transnational human rights litigation, among others. During law school, he also dedicated a semester to study Chilean constitutional law and human rights at the University of Chile and the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. Following graduation, Jacob was awarded a Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies fellowship to work with the NGO Tierrviva in Paraguay. There he worked on litigation supporting indigenous Enxet and Sarapaná communities struggling to recover their traditional territory in the Paraguayan Chaco.

Jacob also holds a Ph.D in Political Science from Columbia University in New York, where he conducted research on environmental politics, the politics of human rights, and social movements. He has authored publications on environmental politics published in the Proceedings on the National Academy of Science, Ecological Economics, and the Journal of Politics.