Charity Ryerson

Charity Ryerson is an attorney, legal designer, activist and strategist with two decades of experience fighting corporate abuse around the globe. She is the Executive Director and Founder of Corporate Accountability Lab, where she leads a team of committed advocates who design, prototype and test new strategies to protect the world and her inhabitants from corporate misconduct. Before CAL, Charity litigated complex international human rights cases under the Alien Tort Statute, Torture Victim Protection Act and state tort law. Her passion for clean supply chains was ignited by the student anti-sweatshop movement, which occupied much of her time while pursuing her Political Science B.A. from Loyola Chicago. In 2003, she served six months in federal prison for civil disobedience at the U.S. Army School of the Americas, where she worked in a prison factory for 12 cents per hour. She has extensive experience in labor and human rights monitoring, anti-union violence investigations, and support for labor organizing in Central and South America. She graduated cum laude from Georgetown Law and is admitted to practice in D.C. and Illinois, and before the U.S. Supreme Court. She teaches Business and Human Rights at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, and in 2021, she received the International Corporate Accountability Roundtable’s Gwynne Skinner Human Rights Award. She is fluent in Spanish, has two rambunctious children, and loves Chicago enough to tolerate the brutal winters