For the past ten years, Marissa Vahlsing has worked as an attorney at EarthRights International, where she focuses on legal strategies to defend the rights of frontline communities in cases against corporations, governments and financial institutions. In 2011, she helped launch EarthRights’s new Amazon Office in Lima, Peru and assisted in developing its Amazon legal program. Since then, Marissa has worked with communities throughout Latin America facing oil pollution, mining, land-grabbing and paramilitary violence on litigation and advocacy strategies. She has litigated several landmark human rights and environmental justice cases before U.S. courts, including Doe v. IFC, Doe v. Chiquita Brands, Maxima Acuna-Atalaya et al. v. Newmont Mining, Minis v. Thomson Safaris, and Maynas v. Occidental. Marissa also serves as counsel on cases before the Inter American Commission on Human Rights and the Inter-American Court. At every turn, she has learned that the law doesn’t provide the answers to the hardest questions, and that those questions are the ones most worth asking. When she is not litigating or working with communities, Marissa is chasing around her toddler or making pottery.