About the Center
The Pace Food Law Center is a program of the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, supporting legal services and advocacy, academic scholarship, and student learning. The Food Law Center was founded in 2015 as the Pace-NRDC Food Law Initiative, a partnership between the Elisabeth Haub School of Law and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Identifying the need for transactional legal services expressed by food, beverage, and agricultural clients, NRDC played a key role in developing the Clinic and the Food Law Center’s other programming. The Clinic launched in 2017 with generous support from Constellation Brands and the Sands Family Foundation. In 2022, after receiving support from New York State to expand access to Clinic services, the Pace-NRDC Food Law Initiative was reorganized as the Pace Food Law Center. We continue to work closely with NRDC to further regional food system goals.
Legal Services and Advocacy
Our legal services and advocacy projects support the transition to a just and sustainable food system. We focus our work on supporting food sovereignty for historically disadvantaged communities, fostering alternative models of food production and distribution, and promoting regenerative climate-friendly agriculture. We provide direct legal services to farmers and food businesses, offer focused legal training, and advocate for systemic policy changes at the local, state, regional, and federal levels. In service of this mission, the Pace Food Law Center works to provide direct transactional legal services to food revolutionaries, build the capacity of the legal community to work on food system issues, and advance transformative, systemic policy change.
Scholarship
The Pace Food Law Center supports the development of food law scholarship, seeking to advance understanding of the role of law in shaping the food system. The Elisabeth Haub School of Law is home to the largest food law faculty in the country. We produce cutting-edge research on everything from public procurement systems, to the right to food, to the treatment of animals in the food system, to domestic food system governance, and more. Our faculty have published work in leading journals and other academic outlets around the world.
Student Learning
Our students engage in food law through the Clinic, other food law coursework, independent research projects, and externships. The Pace Food Law Center supports student work by supervising research, offering career counseling, and assisting student-led initiatives such as the campus garden.