Carmen Gonzalez

Professor Gonzalez teaches torts, environmental law fundamentals, international environmental law, and international trade law. She has published widely in the areas of international environmental law, environmental justice, trade and the environment, and food security.

Professor Gonzalez was a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina, a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, a Visiting Professor at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China, and a U.S. Supreme Court Fellow. She has taught in Seattle University's summer abroad programs in Brazil and Guatemala (in consortium with other law schools), and worked on a portion a Higher Education for Development/U.S. Agency for International Development grant to build environmental law capacity among Central American law professors.

During 2011-2012, Professor Gonzalez served as Chair of the Environmental Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools. She is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of Earthjustice, a member of the Governing Board of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Academy of Environmental Law (IUCNAEL), and a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform, a non-profit research and educational organization of university-affiliated academics that seeks to inform policy debates regarding environmental regulation. She has served as member and vice-chair of the International Subcommittee of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (an advisory body to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on environmental justice issues), co-chaired the IUCNAEL Research Committee, and represented non-governmental organizations in multilateral environmental treaty negotiations.

Professor Gonzalez holds a B.A. from Yale University and a JD from Harvard Law School. Before joining the law school faculty in 1999, she clerked for Judge Thelton E. Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, and practiced law at Pillsbury, Madison and Sutro, where she specialized in environmental litigation. She later served as an attorney at Pacific Gas and Electric Company and as Assistant Regional Counsel in the San Francisco office of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Professor Gonzalez is the co-editor of the critically acclaimed book, Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia (with Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs, Yolanda Flores Niemann, and Angela P. Harris, eds., 2012). Her latest book, International Environmental Law and the Global South (with Shawkat Alam, Sumudu Atapattu, and Jona Razzaque, eds.) was published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press. During Spring quarter 2017, Professor Gonzalez served as the George Soros Visiting Chair at the Central European University School of Public Policy in Budapest, Hungary.