Camila Bustos

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’s 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.

• BA, Brown University
• JD, Yale Law School

• International Human Rights Seminar
• Environmental Law Survey
• Environmental Law Seminar: Climate Change & Migration

View all of Professor Bustos's publications by downloading her CV (PDF).

• 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 Urgent Need to Re-imagine Human Rights Clinics: Towards an Interdisciplinary Clinical Model, 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 (April 2021) (with John Willshire Carrera, Deborah Anker, Thomas Becker & Jeffrey S. Chase)
• Environmental Law in Colombia, in Earth Law: A Practitioner’s Guide (Tony Zelle and Herman Greene eds., 2020) (with Whitney Richardson).
• The Third Space of Puerto Rican Sovereignty: Reimagining Self-Determination Beyond State Sovereignty 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 Standing for a sustainable world (Claude Henry, Hojan Rockstrom and Nicholas Stern, 2020) (with Valentina Rozo-Ángel & Gabriela Eslava-Bejarano).

• Francis Wayland Prize (Yale Law)
• Switzer Fellow
• Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow

Climate litigation, corporate accountability, climate migration, climate displacement, climate ethics