It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Natalie Bridgeman Fields (right) as today's guest blogger.Natalie's the Executive Director of San Francisco-based Accountability Counsel, a legal nonprofit that she founded in 2009. The organization represents environmental and human rights of communities around the world by creating, strengthening, and using accountability systems. Its particular focus is on nonjudicial grievance procedures related to international finance and development. In her guest post below, she discusses one such mechanism, the U.S. National Contact Point for OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises.
Having been graduated from Cornell University in 1999, Natalie received her J.D. in 2002 from UCLA, where she was Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of International Law and Foreign Affairs. While a law student she interned at the Center for International Environmental Law, served as a consultant to a World Bank inspection panel, and was a law clerk to a North American Free Trade Agreement arbiter. Immediately after law school she was a litigation associate at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, working on commercial cases and on Cabello v. Fernández-Larios, a pro bono Alien Tort Statute case. Since starting her own law firm, she has helped to litigate another ATS case, as well as the post-9/11 lawsuit captioned José Padilla v. John Yoo (additional prior post), both pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.
Along with Professor David B. Hunter, Natalie also co-teaches a course on International Institutions and Environmental Protection during the Environmental Law Summer Session at American University Washington College of Law.
Heartfelt welcome!
