Annual Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic Distinguished Lecture featuring Gerald Torres
Dean Anthony E. Varona and Seattle University School of Law invite you to the annual Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic Distinguished Lecture featuring Gerald Torres, Dolores Huerta & Wilma Mankiller Professor of Environmental Justice and Professor of Law at Yale University.
Taking place annually, the Delgado/Stefancic Lecture honors the lifetime contributions of Seattle University School of Law Professors Delgado and Stefancic to critical outsider jurisprudence by bringing to the Seattle U Law community a scholar who has made significant contributions to critical scholarship.
Acclaimed law professors who previously served on the faculty, Delgado and Stefancic returned to Seattle U Law in the summer of 2022. As leading authors and theorists on race and social change in the United States, they have published numerous books and articles over their remarkable careers that have explored groundbreaking legal frameworks, including critical race theory.
Torres' talk, "The Evolving Crisis of Human Rights and Climate Migration,” will discuss the challenges created when climate change fuels natural disasters that force large populations to move around the world.
"It is a stark reality that most countries do not recognize climate migrants as refugees under existing international law. This leaves them without the legal protections and rights of conventional refugees," Torres says. "The existing legal frameworks are not designed to address the circumstances of climate-induced migration. This leaves gaps in protection and puts these populations at risk of discrimination and hostility in host countries, resulting in social tensions and human rights abuses, and often contributing to the rise in xenophobic politics."
Date: Tuesday, March 11, 2025
Lecture: 4 - 5 p.m.
Reception: 5 - 6 p.m.
Location: Room 110, Sullivan Hall (lecture), Second Floor Gallery (reception)
About Professor Gerald Torres
Gerald Torres is the Dolores Huerta & Wilma Mankiller Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment with a secondary appointment at the Yale Law School. He is the former Association of American Law Schools president and has taught at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools. Professor Torres served as Counsel to the Attorney General on environmental matters and Indian affairs at the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as on the board of the Environmental Law Institute and the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and was the founding chairman of the Advancement Project. He is board chair of Earth Day, a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and was a consultant to the United Nations on environmental matters. Torres is a life member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations.
Torres has done groundbreaking work in agricultural law and policy, especially on the environmental regulation of food and fiber production. He has written in the area of water resource management. While continuing to focus on the role of social movements in producing durable legal change, Torres is finishing a book on environmental justice. An internationally known scholar of Indian law, Torres has recently focused on cooperative resource management and the changing legal landscape within American territories.