Kathleen Kelly is a Clinical Lecturer at Stanford Law School, where she oversees the International Human Rights and Development Clinical Program and focuses on human rights and gender issues in Sub-Saharan Africa. Throughout her legal career, Kathleen has been dedicated to furthering the cause of human rights and social activism both globally and locally.

Over the course of the past two years Kathleen helped to launch the first-ever in-country international human rights clinic in Namibia, supervising Stanford students in fieldwork relating issues of rule of law, gender, HIV/AIDS, politically motivated sexual violence, mining law, water rights, and the Convention Against Torture. While at Stanford, Kathleen also helped to develop an International Humanitarian Law Clinic, which became the first clinic in the country to represent detainees at Bagram Prison in Afghanistan. Through this clinic she oversaw the litigation that led to the landmark decision of Al Maqaleh v. Gates, which extended the writ of habeas corpus to thousands of detainees held in indefinite detention by the U.S. Government.

Prior to starting at Stanford Law School, Kathleen spent four years as a commercial litigation attorney at Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner LLP, focusing in the areas of antitrust and white collar law. During her time at Thelen, she was dedicated to promoting pro bono social justice work within the law firm setting. She worked closely with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights in San Francisco, mentoring dozens of associates on international refugee law and successfully representing numerous asylum applicants from countries all over the world including Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Somalia, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Kenya.

While at Thelen, Kathleen also co-founded Spark, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to build a community of young, global citizens who are invested in changing patterns of inequality that impact women throughout the world. Over the past five years, as Board President Kathleen has led Spark to engage 5000 young professionals in San Francisco, raise nearly $750,000 for grassroots women’s organizations, launch a speaker series to educate young professionals about challenges that women face around the world, and initiate advocacy efforts to provide a voice to the women that Spark supports. In 2007, Kathleen was named Young Nonprofit Professionals’ Board Leader of the Year for her work with Spark.

While a law student at Berkeley, Kathleen worked closely with the International Human Rights Clinic, and the Center for Justice and Accountability, where she conducted extensive research on human rights abuses in El Salvador in the 1980s and particularly the murder of Archbishop Romero.

Kathleen has served on the board of directors of Circulo de Vida, a comprehensive support center in the Mission for Latinos living with cancer, and is a member of the 2007-2008 class for Leadership San Francisco.