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Camila Bustos
Biography
Camila Bustos joined the faculty in 2023. Prior to joining the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University, Professor Bustos was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Human Rights at Trinity College and a Clinical Supervisor in human rights practice at the University Network for Human Rights. She also served as a term law clerk to Justice Steven D. Ecker of the Connecticut Supreme Court and as a consultant with the International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP).
Professor Bustos is a graduate from Yale Law School, where she received the Francis Wayland Prize and was a Switzer Foundation Fellow and a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. During law school, she worked at the Center for Climate Integrity, the Climate Litigation Network, and EarthRights International. Professor Bustos also co-founded Law Students for Climate Accountability, a national law student-led movement pushing the legal industry to phase out fossil fuel representation and support a just, livable future. She was also the co-chair of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project at Yale, and co-chair of the Women of Color Collective. Prior to law school, she worked as a human rights researcher at the Center for the Study of Law, Justice, and Society (Dejusticia) in Colombia.
Professor Bustos’ writing has appeared in the N.Y.U. Environmental Law Journal, the Connecticut Law Review, the Albany Law Review, and the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, among others. Her research and scholarship focuses on human rights and environmental law. She is a frequent presenter on climate displacement, climate law, and environmental justice, and has provided expert testimony before the Canadian Senate and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. She serves as a board member of Law Students for Climate Accountability and Save the Sound.
Education
- BA, Brown University
- JD, Yale Law School
Selected Publications
View all of Professor Bustos's publications on Digital Commons or download her CV (PDF).
- Representing Climate Wreckers, N.Y.U. Env’t. L. J. (forthcoming 2025).
- Displacing Climate Precarity, 87 Albany L. Rev. __ (forthcoming 2025) (with Julia Neusner).
- The Role of Private Law Firms, in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Private Law (Doug Kysar and Ernest Lim, eds.) (forthcoming 2025).
- Teaching Legal Ethics and the Climate Emergency in Educating lawyers for climate and environmental justice: theory and practice (Richard Grimes, Stephen Levett & Rebecca Samaras, eds., 2024) (forthcoming 2025).
- Climate Migration in Colombia: A Foretold Tragedy? , 56 Case Western Reserve J. of Int’l L. 360 (2024).
- Climate Migration and Displacement: A Case Study of Puerto Rican Women in Connecticut, 55 CONN. L. REV. 781 (2023) (with Bruni Pizarro & Tabitha Sookdeo).
- A Human Rights Approach to Climate Displacement: Examples from Central America and Colombia, 31 MICH. ST. INT’L L. REV. 403 (2023) (with Juliana Vélez-Echeverri).
- Implementing Nature’s Rights in Colombia: The Atrato and Amazon Experiences, 54 REV. DER. DEL ESTADO 227 (2022) (with Whitney Richardson).
- Movement Lawyering in the Time of the Climate Crisis, 39 PACE ENVTL. L. REV. 1 (2022).
- The Third Space of Puerto Rican Sovereignty: Reimagining Self-Determination Beyond State Sovereignty 32 Yale J. of L. & Feminism 73 (2020).
Honors & Awards
- Hudson Valley Hispanic Bar Association “Trail Blazer” Award
- Francis Wayland Prize (Yale Law)
- Switzer Fellow
- Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow
Areas of Interest
Climate litigation, corporate accountability, climate migration, climate displacement, climate ethics
Related News and Stories
Haub Environmental Law Professor Camila Bustos highlights Baltimore’s legal efforts to hold Big Oil accountable in an article for The Baltimore Sun, emphasizing the right of communities to seek justice for climate impacts. “Communities like Baltimore deserve their day in court,” she writes.
On September 7, 2024, the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University hosted the inaugural Early Environmental Law Scholars (EELS) Conference. The goal of the Early Environmental Law Scholars is to foster community building, idea exchange, and professional development for emerging scholars in the field.