2022 Academic Conference

Mark Magaña

Mark Magaña is the Founding President & CEO of GreenLatinos, a National network of Latino environmental and conservation advocates.

He is the first Latino to have served as senior staff at both the White House and in Congressional leadership – as Special Assistant to President Clinton for White House Legislative Affairs and Senior Policy Advisor to the House Democratic Caucus Vice-Chair Robert Menendez. He also served as a Presidentially appointed Congressional Liaison at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as Legislative Assistant to Congressional Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA), as a Federal Legislative Representative for the City of Los Angeles, and as a Research Assistant for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO).

As an early supporter of Senator Obama's Presidential Campaign, in February of 2007, he founded the National Latinos for Obama. Through Latinos for Obama, he helped build a national grassroots organization and mobilization effort. Today, he also serves on the boards of the League of Conservation Voters, Green 2.0, and the Children’s Environmental Health Network.

Jeffrey M. Prieto

Jeffrey Prieto currently serves as the General Counsel of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Prieto recently served as the General Counsel of the Los Angeles Community College District. His prior federal government service includes nearly 20 years across various agencies, including as an Attorney-Advisor here in EPA’s Office of Water. Under the Obama-Biden administration, he served as the Senate confirmed General Counsel of the United States Department of Agriculture. He also served at the U.S. Department of Justice Environment and Natural Resources Division where he worked to implement environmental justice policies and initiatives. Prior to his federal service, Prieto worked as environmental planner for a California municipality. Jeffrey's skill and legal expertise will help EPA advance our mission, bolster our work on environmental justice, and deliver on the President's bold climate agenda.

Gerald Torres

Gerald Torres is Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment, with a secondary appointment as Professor of Law at the Law School.

A pioneer in the field of environmental law, Torres has spent his career examining the intrinsic connections between the environment, agricultural and food systems, and social justice. His research into how race and ethnicity impact environmental policy has been influential in the emergence and evolution of the field of environmental justice. His work also includes the study of conflicts over resource management between Native American tribes, states, and the federal government.

Previously, Torres taught at Cornell Law School, the University of Texas Law School, and the University of Minnesota Law School, serving as an associate dean at both. He is also a former president of the Association of American Law Schools and served as deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice during the Clinton administration. 

Torres’s past work has examined how U.S. regulations have created racially or ethnically marginalized communities that bear a disproportionate share of environmental burdens and also has focused on developing strategies to improve governmental decision-making. He is also a leading scholar in critical race theory — a theoretical framework that examines questions of race and racism from a legal standpoint. His book The Miner’s Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy, coauthored with Lani Guinier, was described as “one of the most provocative and challenging books on race produced in years.”

Richard L. Revesz (moderator)

Richard L. Revesz, the AnBryce Professor of Law and Dean Emeritus at NYU Law School, is one of the nation’s leading voices in environmental and regulatory law and policy. At NYU, he directs the Institute for Policy Integrity, a think tank and advocacy organization focusing in these areas. Revesz received a BS summa cum laude from Princeton University, an MS in civil engineering from MIT, and a JD from Yale Law School, where he was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. After judicial clerkships with Chief Judge Wilfred Feinberg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit and Justice Thurgood Marshall of the US Supreme Court, Revesz joined the NYU faculty in 1985 and served as Dean from 2002-13. Revesz is the director of the American Law Institute, the leading independent organization in the U.S. producing scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and otherwise improve the law; a senior fellow of the Administrative Conference of the United States; and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Panel 2: Examining Environmental Justice & Climate Migration in LatAm (March 30th, 1:00–2:30 PM est)

NYU Law School’s IRAP student chapter is co-sponsoring this event.

Caio Borges

Caio Borges is a lawyer with a law degree from the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), a master's degree in law and development from the São Paulo Law School at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (FGV-SP) and a doctorate in philosophy and the general theory of law from the University of São Paulo (USP). He is currently the Law and Climate Portfolio Coordinator at the Institute for Climate and Society.

He was the coordinator of the programs of business, human rights, development and socio-environmental rights at Conectas Human Rights (2014-2019). During his master’s degree, he was a lecturer in sustainability management and was a researcher at the Center for Human Rights and Companies at FGV-SP. Before joining the third sector, he worked in the private financial sector. He has 10 years of experience in sustainable finance, companies and human rights and international development. He is a non-resident fellow of the Center for BRICS Studies at Fudan University (China) and the Center for Studies on Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean at the O.P. Jindal Global University (India). At iCS, he coordinates the law and climate portfolio, which aims to work with the Brazilian justice system to act proactively and assertively in the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Pablo Escribano

Pablo Escribano is the IOM Regional Thematic Specialist on Migration, Environment and Climate Change covering the Americas from the Regional Office in San Jose, Costa Rica. He supports IOM offices in the region in addressing the multiple aspects of environmental migration and contributes to giving visibility to the challenges faced in the Americas on the migration, environment and climate change nexus.

Florencia Saulino

María Florencia Saulino is a Professor of Law at Universidad de San Andrés and a Global Clinical Professor of Law at New York University. She received her Master of Laws from New York University School of Law with a concentration on Environmental Law, and her Doctorate in Law from Universidad de Buenos Aires. She worked as a Research Fellow in NYU’s Center on Environmental and Land Use Law, performing research on comparative environmental law and policy. Before joining the Universidad de San Andrés faculty, she was a Professor of Law at Universidad de Palermo where she directed the Center for Studies on Environmental Law and Policy (CEDEPA). She clerked for the Honorable Chief Justice Ricardo Lorenzetti in the Argentine Supreme Court. Since 2017 she is a Professor of Law at Universidad de San Andrés School of Law where she also teaches “Environmental Law” and "Public Interest Law Clinic”. In 2013, she joined NYU Law Abroad faculty, where she teaches the "Clinic on Policy Advocacy in Latin America". She has worked as a research consultant for the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the World Bank, and the United Nations Development Program.

Dr. Diogo Andreola Serraglio

Dr. Diogo Andreola Serraglio is a climate-induced migration specialist. He earned an M.D. and Ph.D. in Law at the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná (PUCPR, Brazil), and completed his postdoctoral research at the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE, Germany). Currently, he serves as the Global Focal Point at the South American Network for Environmental Migrations (RESAMA) and is a research member of the World Commission on Environmental Law (WCEL) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

Dr. César Rodríguez-Garavito (Moderator)

César Rodríguez-Garavito is a Professor of Clinical Law and Chair and Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. He is a human rights and environmental justice scholar and practitioner whose interests focus on global governance, climate change, socioeconomic rights, business and human rights, and the human rights movement.

Rodríguez-Garavito is the Founding Director of the Climate Litigation Accelerator. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Open Global Rights and has served as a strategy advisor to leading international and domestic human rights organizations in different parts of the world. He has been an expert witness for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an Adjunct Judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, and a lead litigator in climate change, socioeconomic rights, and Indigenous rights cases.

Rodríguez-Garavito is a Distinguished Fellow at the National Foundation for India and a member of the strategic litigation advisory panel at Conectas Human Rights (Brazil). He has served as director of Dejusticia, the Global Justice and Human Rights Program, and the Center for Socio-Legal Research at the University of los Andes (Colombia). He has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Brown University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Pretoria (South Africa), and the Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil).

Rodríguez-Garavito is co-editor of Cambridge University Press’s Globalization and Human Rights book series, and has served on the editorial boards of the Annual Review of Law and Social Science and the Business and Human Rights Journal. He serves on the boards of WITNESS, the University Network for Human Rights, and Columbia University’s Center on Sustainable Investment. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.A. from NYU’s Institute for Law and Society, an M.A. in Philosophy from the National University of Colombia, and a J.D. from the University of the Andes.