"Were we too equivocal in expressing our support for litigation?" I asked Marissa. "Did we hold back our convictions out of a patronizing effort not to undermine community agency?"

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Benjamin Hoffman is an attorney with EarthRights International. He first joined EarthRights in 2011, spending three years in the Amazon office in Lima, Peru, providing litigation support to communities from the Andean-Amazonian region resisting the harmful consequences of resource extraction and mega-development projects. Through this work, he contributed to EarthRights’ goal of better integrating community collaboration and co-empowerment in human rights advocacy strategies and methodology; he is the co-author of several law review articles on the topic. He then worked for five years co-teaching the Columbia Law School Human Rights Clinic, continuing his work to disrupt global corporate-community power imbalances in the business and human rights field, including in the context of workers’ rights advocacy. For his contributions to the law school, he received the 2016 Faculty Honors Award from the Columbia Society of International Law. He rejoined EarthRights in 2019.