Haub Environmental Law Professor Camila Bustos highlights Baltimore鈥檚 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. 鈥淐ommunities like Baltimore deserve their day in court,鈥 she writes.
Camila Bustos
Biography
Camila Bustos joined the faculty in 2023. Prior to joining the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at 绿巨人视频, 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鈥檚 writing has appeared in The Guardian, the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, the ABA Human Rights Magazine, and the first legal casebook on Earth Law. Her research and scholarship focuses on human rights law, environmental law, international environmental law, and climate change law. Her forthcoming co-authored article, Climate Migration and Displacement: A Case Study of Puerto Rican Women in Connecticut, will be published in the Connecticut Law Review. She is a frequent presenter on climate displacement, human rights, climate law, climate ethics, environmental justice, and more. Currently, she serves on the Advisory Board of Law Students for Climate Accountability, and she is a Board Member of Breach Collective.
Education
- BA, Brown University
- JD, Yale Law School
Selected Publications
View all of Professor Bustos's publications on or download her CV (PDF).
- , 55 CONN. L. REV. 781 (2023) (with Bruni Pizarro & Tabitha Sookdeo).
- , 31 MICH. ST. INT鈥橪 L. REV. 403 (2023) (with Juliana V茅lez-Echeverri).
- , 54 REV. DER. DEL ESTADO 227 (2022) (with Whitney Richardson).
- , 39 PACE ENVTL. L. REV. 1 (2022).
- , STUDIES ON CLINICAL TEACHING IN LAW SCHOOLS (2022) (in Spanish, with James Cavallaro).
- Shelter from the Storm: Policy Options to Address Climate Induced Migration from the Northern Triangle, Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program, HLS Immigration Project, the University Network for Human Rights, Yale Immigrant Justice Project, and Yale Environmental Law Association (PDF) (April 2021) (with John Willshire Carrera, Deborah Anker, Thomas Becker & Jeffrey S. Chase)
- Environmental Law in Colombia, in (Tony Zelle and Herman Greene eds., 2020) (with Whitney Richardson).
- 32 Yale J. of L. & Feminism 73 (2020).
- Protecting the rights of future generations through climate litigation: lessons from the struggle against deforestation in the Colombian Amazon, in (Claude Henry, Hojan Rockstrom and Nicholas Stern, 2020) (with Valentina Rozo-脕ngel & Gabriela Eslava-Bejarano).
Honors & Awards
- 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
On September 7, 2024, the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at 绿巨人视频 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.
Elisabeth Haub School of Law Professor Camila Bustos was featured in Nature regarding the slow responses to climate change, despite it being acknowledge as a health emergency. She discusses how citizens and experts are turning to the courts as a path towards accountability, action and adaptation.