Karina Tefft

Staff Attorney

Karina joined NCLEJ as a Columbia Law School Public Interest Fellow in 2019 and become a staff attorney in 2020. 

At NCLEJ, Karina’s litigation and advocacy areas include civil rights, combatting predatory debt collection, and challenging racialized wealth extraction schemes through ticketing, fines, and fees. Karina is a steering committee member of the Buffalo, New York Fair Fines and Fees Coalition, which works to end the use of punitive and extractive fines and fees, to divest from policing, and to advance racial and economic justice through direct investment in over-policed and under-resourced communities.  

Karina is a graduate of the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Law, where she took part in the Community Economic Development Clinic and Economic Justice Project Clinic. During her law school summers, Karina worked at the Bronx Defenders and New Economy Project. Karina received her undergraduate degree from Susquehanna University.

Prior to law school, Karina engaged in grassroots policy organizing in Pennsylvania to support the movement to end mass incarceration and to end the criminalization of poverty.