BENJAMIN LOCKE

School of Law

Juris Doctorate, May 2011

Bio and Resume (.pdf)

Benjamin Locke is an international social justice advocate interested in how communities and grassroots justice campaigns adapt human rights doctrine to their distinct strategic needs and cultural values. Benjamin plans to use these observations as the basis for developing community-based and campaign-centered approaches to human rights that will increase the tools and strategies available for empowering justice claims. Moreover, he is working to articulate a concept of transnational "lawyering" that imagines lawyers as architects of multi-component, interdisciplinary campaigns that range far beyond the courtroom in order to solve complex justice problems.

Since 2006, Benjamin has worked to help found and develop two Latin American organizations focused on strengthening civil society in order to fortify human rights regimes. Working with the Project on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, he collaborated on multiple campaigns for labor, indigenous and women's rights and learned to integrate legal and non-legal strategies in order to protect human rights where rule of law is weak. Working with the Project on Organizing, Development, Education and Research (PODER), he helped link local and international civil society groups in order to launch coordinated strategies against transnational human rights violators. He has also conducted independent research in Bolivia, where he identified the diffusion of human rights legal concepts into local, indigenous values systems, enabling communities to contemplate new social and political arrangements.

Benjamin's upcoming project with the Western Shoshone Defense Project will integrate many of his themes of interest. He will be working on the growing conflict zone between indigenous peoples and extractive industries, particularly where the law does not recognize historic and cultural values-based claims to land. Moreover, he is beginning his work with the New York University Law School's Immigrant Rights Clinic, which will provide intensive legal training on the cutting edge of the struggle to protect the rights of those made most vulnerable by the powerful economic and social forces driving massive human migration.

Benjamin earned a Master of International Affairs from the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, and a Bachelor of Arts in Chemistry from the University of Chicago. Prior to his work in human rights, Benjamin conducted infectious diseases research at Columbia University and worked on community health in indigent communities in Ecuador and in New York's Chinatown.