Ellie Happel

Staff Attorney, Global Justice Clinic
Director, Global Justice Clinic Haiti Project

Ellie Happel is a staff attorney with the Global Justice Clinic at NYU School of Law, where she directs the Clinic’s Haiti Project. Ellie also co-supervises the Clinic’s work on legal empowerment, immigration and access to justice. She co-teaches the Global Justice Clinic seminar. Ellie lived and worked in Haiti from the fall of 2011 through 2017, and returns frequently in connection with her work. In 2011, Ellie received the Arthur Helton Human Rights fellowship to work on cases of forced eviction in the internally displaced people (IDP) camps in Port-au-Prince. In the beginning of 2013, Ellie supported the Global Justice Clinic to launch its ongoing project monitoring Haiti’s emerging gold mining sector. 

Since becoming based at NYU Law in 2017, Ellie co-authored a report arguing for an extension of TPS for Haiti, Extraordinary Conditions: A Statutory Analysis of Haiti’s Qualification for TPS and served as an expert witness in the Saget v. Trump case in the Eastern District of New York. Ellie is a 2011 graduate of NYU School of Law where she was a Root Tilden Kern Scholar. She holds a B.A in Metropolitan Studies from New York University.