Kirti Datla is the Director of Earthjustice’s Strategic Legal Advocacy Program. Earthjustice is the largest nonprofit environmental law firm in the United States, with 240 lawyers across the country and more than 760 active cases. She leads Earthjustice’s efforts to anticipate and shape the doctrines that affect all of its cases, such as justiciability, review of agency actions, and constitutional doctrines about federal power and the shape of the federal government. This collaborative work spans Earthjustice’s own cases and also cases litigated by other environmental or regulatory litigation groups that implicate these issues. The Strategic Legal Advocacy Program’s work ranges from serving as lead counsel, to advising case teams, to providing research and educational programming.

Before joining Earthjustice, Kirti practiced in the Supreme Court and Appellate practice group at Hogan Lovells US LLP. There, she briefed numerous cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, briefed dozens of appeals and district court motions, and argued before the federal courts of appeals in addition to arguing before district and state courts. Earlier, Kirti served as an attorney-adviser in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, where she reviewed the legality of presidential orders, advised federal agencies on questions of constitutional and administrative law, and reviewed pending legislation for constitutional risk.

Kirti served as a law clerk for Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor of the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Judge Jeffrey S. Sutton of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and Judge Amul R. Thapar, then of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky (now of the Sixth Circuit).

Kirti is an appointed Public Member of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an independent federal agency dedicated to improving the federal administrative process. Since 2023, she has served as the Chair of ACUS’s Judicial Review Committee. Since 2025, she has been an elected member of the American Law Institute, an independent organization producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law.

She serves on the Boards of the Harvard Environmental and Energy Law Program and the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU School of Law.

In 2022, Kirti received the New York University School of Law Recent Graduate Award. She has also been featured in Bloomberg Law’s 2024 They’ve Got Next: The 40 Under 40 and was named a Rising Star by the South Asian Bar Association in 2021.

She graduated summa cum laude from the NYU School of Law, graduating first in her class and receiving, among other awards, the Benjamin F. Butler Memorial Award for unusual distinction in scholarship and character. She received a B.A. in environmental engineering from Rice University, cum laude.