Professor Carmen G. Gonzalez 

IAS Fellow at St Mary's College, January - March 2026

Contact Details

• Home Institution email: cgonzalez19@luc.edu
• Durham email: TBC
• Durham Tel: TBC

Carmen G. Gonzalez is the Morris I. Leibman Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. She is a world-renowned international law scholar whose work focuses on the intersection of climate law, human rights law, and racial and economic inequality.

Professor Gonzalez has published six books and more than sixty law journal articles, book chapters, and scholarly essays. She has made ground-breaking contributions to the literature on human rights and the environment; environmental, energy, and climate justice; international environmental law; the global food system; climate change-induced migration; and most recently, the implications for legal scholarship of the interdisciplinary literature on racial capitalism.

Her publications include The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development (Cambridge University Press, 2021); Energy Justice: US and International Perspectives (Edward Elgar, 2018); and International Environmental Law and the Global South (Cambridge University Press, 2015). She also co-edited two books on the experiences of racialized and Indigenous women in academia, Presumed Incompetent: The Intersection of Race and Class for Women in Academia (2012) and Presumed Incompetent II: Race, Class, Power, and Resistance of Women in Academia (2020), both published by the University Press of Colorado.

Professor Gonzalez holds a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She has been honored with numerous awards and prestigious academic appointments. She served as a U.S. Supreme Court Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina, a Visiting Scholar at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law at the University of Cambridge, an Institute for Advanced Studies Fellow at the University of Warwick, and a Visiting Professor at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China. She was awarded the George Soros Visiting Chair at the Central European University School of Public Policy in Budapest, Hungary and served as the Norton Rose Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Houston Law Center. She has also conducted workshops and trainings for environmental law faculty and practitioners in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe financed by the Asian Development Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. 

Professor Gonzalez currently serves on the Senior Editorial Board of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment. She previously chaired the Environmental Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools and served as Vice Chair of the Governing Board of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Academy of Environmental Law. She also served for nearly a decade on the Board of Trustees of Earthjustice, the largest public interest environmental law firm in the United States, and chaired its committee on diversity, equity, and inclusion. In recognition of her outstanding service to Earthjustice, she was named an Honorary Life Trustee in 2021. 

In her most recent scholarship, Professor Gonzalez draws attention to the ways that the climate crisis is also a crisis of racial justice. She examines how racism is central to the functioning of the capitalist world economy and to the practices, policies, and ideologies that drive the climate crisis. Her nuanced and novel arguments have already begun to serve as a reference point for legal scholarship on climate change and race and have inspired two law journal symposia on racial capitalism and climate justice.

As an IAS Fellow at Durham University, Professor Gonzalez will be collaborating with Professor Andrew Baldwin (Geography), Dr Simona Capisani (Philosophy), and Dr Christopher Szabla (Law) in an interdisciplinary analysis of the concept of climate apartheid. She will work with her collaborators to trace the concept’s legal and political dimensions and to explore how the idea of climate apartheid gets mobilized in narratives about climate change and climate migration.

Events

TBC