Carmen Gonzalez

Carmen G. Gonzalez is the Morris I. Leibman Professor of Law at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

She has taught courses on environmental law, hazardous waste and toxics regulation, torts, administrative law, international trade law, and international environmental law.

While in academia, Professor Gonzalez has advised the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on international environmental justice matters by serving as member and vice-chair of the International Subcommittee of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Professor Gonzalez also worked as legal representative for the Basel Action Network (a non-governmental organization seeking to curb the export of hazardous wastes to developing countries) during the negotiation of the Liability Protocol to the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal. In 2010-2012, Professor Gonzalez was part of a team of U.S. law professors that was awarded a $650,000 grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to conduct environmental law capacity-building workshops for Central American law professors.  Finally, Professor Gonzalez served on the International Bar Association’s Working Group on Legal Aspects of Climate Change Adaptation and on the board of trustees of Earthjustice, a public interest environmental law firm.  In 2015, she was recognized as an environmental leader of color by Green 2.0, an organization working to increase diversity among mainstream environmental organizations, government agencies, and foundations.

After earning her B.A. from Yale University and her J.D. from Harvard Law School, Professor Gonzalez clerked for Judge Thelton E. Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. She was subsequently an attorney at Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro, where she specialized in environmental litigation. From 1991 to 1994, Professor Gonzalez worked as a transactional attorney at Pacific Gas and Electric Company. From 1994 to 1998, Professor Gonzalez was assistant regional counsel in the San Francisco office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA). At EPA, Professor Gonzalez handled a wide variety of environmental cases involving Superfund and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. She also served on the U.S. EPA team addressing environmental problems along the U.S.-Mexican border.

Professor Gonzalez has published widely in the areas of international environmental law, environmental justice, and food security. In addition to her law journal publications, she is co-editor of International Environmental Law and the Global South (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Professor Gonzalez was a Fulbright Scholar in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where she taught international environmental law at the Universidad del Salvador. She also spent a year in Ukraine working on a USAID-funded environmental law project. In 2004-2005, Professor Gonzalez served as one of four Supreme Court Fellows selected by a panel of distinguished lawyers and judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the United States. Professor Gonzalez was a visiting scholar at Cambridge University’s Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, and a visiting professor at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center, a joint project of Johns Hopkins University and the University of Nanjing. In 2010-2011, she served as chair of the Environmental Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, and she currently serves as co-chair of the Research Committee of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Academy of Environmental Law. Professor Gonzalez was selected as the George Soros Visiting Chair at the Central European University School of Public Policy in Budapest, Hungary for Spring 2017.