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Global Law and Policy for the Americas Initiative

Annoucements/News

Trujillo at event
Trujillo at event

Professor Elizabeth Trujillo recently spoke on Teaching Comparative Law in Trade and Sustainable Development on a panel on and chaired a panel on Legal Heterodoxy in the Global South, at the American Society of Comparative Law 2024 Annual Meeting on “Innovation and Sustainability: Comparative Law for a Better World,” hosted by Texas A&M University School of Law, https://ascl.org/ascl-events/

Book Cover

Professor Elizabeth Trujillo recently published, The USMCA and the Environment: Setting Trends for Global and Regional Trade, in The Future of Trade: A North American Perspective (David A. Gantz and Tony Payan, eds, 2023).  This was a grant-funded project sponsored by Rice University’s Bake Institute for Public Law and Policy Center for US-Mexico and the Charles Koch Foundation.  More on this publication can be found here.

Confusion continues over Texas immigration law

March 20, 2024 - The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked Texas' new controversial immigration law from taking effect, hours after the Supreme Court allowed the law to go forward. The law lets local and state police arrest people in the country without documentation.

Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes speaks with Daniel Morales, a professor of law at the University of Houston.

UHLC Professor Elizabeth Trujillo receives the award for Outstanding Graduate Mentor at the 2024 UH Faculty Excellence Awards ceremony.

Trujillo

Confusion continues over Texas immigration law

March 20, 2024 - The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked Texas' new controversial immigration law from taking effect, hours after the Supreme Court allowed the law to go forward. The law lets local and state police arrest people in the country without documentation.

Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes speaks with Daniel Morales, a professor of law at the University of Houston.

Book CoverProfessor Elizabeth Trujillo recently published, The USMCA and the Environment: Setting Trends for Global and Regional Trade, in The Future of Trade: A North American Perspective (David A. Gantz and Tony Payan, eds, 2023).  This was a grant-funded project sponsored by Rice University’s Bake Institute for Public Law and Policy Center for US-Mexico and the Charles Koch Foundation.    More on this publication can be found here: https://www.elgaronline.com/edcollbook/book/9781035315420/9781035315420.xml

International Law Week-end

Congratulations to Professor Gebru’s recent participation at International Law Week-end in NYC

Professor Gebru’s participated in the panel Beyond Multilateral Intellectual Property Law at International Law Week-end (Oct. 19-21, 2023) in New York City hosted by the American Branch of the International Law Association

GLPA is proud to announce the Houston Journal of International Law (HJIL) Symposium Issue 45:1 that summarizes the papers and presentations from the GLPA webinar series, “Constitutionalism, Trade, Social Justice, & Sustainability in the Americas: Lessons from the 2020 Global Pandemic,“ and the follow-up webinar, “Global Challenges, Local Solutions: Supply Chains, Sustainability, and Governance.” For more information on the publication, click here.

The Introduction to the Symposium series, Global Challenges, Local Solutions: An Introduction to New Perspectives to International and Comparative Law, can be found here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4592455

Many thanks to all the speakers and authors who participated in this event, and to HJIL for its editorial support and co-sponsorship; to the University of Bologna Department of Political and Social Sciences and its Center for Latin American Studies for co-sponsoring and co-hosting this series; to my co-host and co-author Professor Sabrina Ragone, and to the American Society of International Law-Latin American Interest Group for co-hosting the first GLPA webinar series. We hope that the research outcomes from this collaborative project will inspire more research, dialogue, and scholarship on cutting-edge topics that implicate the delicate overlap of the local with the global, impacting our region and the world today.

Elizabeth Trujillo
Mary Ann & Lawrence E. Faust Professor of Law
Founding Director, Initiative on Global Law and Policy for the America

Student Opportunities

2023-2024 Legal Internship

The Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) is seeking interns to work in the Legal Affairs & SEM Unit between September 2023 and June 2024. Interns will have an exciting opportunity to work on several submissions at various stages in the trilateral Submissions on Enforcement Matters (SEM) process under the Environment Chapter of the USMCA/CUSMA as well as on other in-house legal matters relevant to the CEC’s work as an international organization.

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Global Law and Policy for the Americas Initiative invites you to a lunch presentation on Environmental Enforcement & Environmental Justice in North America

 April 18, 2023

Click here for more information

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FEBRUARY 28, 12:30 P.M. ET  

Navigating the Clerkship Process for Law Students of Color and First-Generation Law Students

Please join ACS for a panel discussion aimed at demystifying judicial clerkships, specifically for law students of color and first-generation law students. Participants will learn more about the clerkship process, whether they should apply for a clerkship, the differences between state, federal, trial, and appellate clerkships, the qualities that judges look for in judicial clerks, and the day-to-day experience of being a clerk. Panelists will also provide best practices for navigating the clerkship application process and discuss the importance of increasing diversity in judicial clerkships.

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Professor Elizabeth Trujillo shares optimism in the reenergized trilateral economic relationship among USMCA partners in a recent CBC news article highlighting the outcomes of the North American Leader’s Summit on January 9-10, 2023 in Mexico City.  For more, please read this.

University of Houston Law Center professors receive grant for collaborative research to organize ‘Sustainability Week’ in Italy

Trujillo

April 06, 2023 — The University of Bologna is providing funding to the University of Houston Law Center to co-host "Sustainability Week" in Bologna, Italy.

Professor Trujillo teaching

Professor Trujillo teaching

Professor Trujillo teaching

On June 16, 2022, Professor Elizabeth Trujillo was invited by the University of Bologna Center for Latin American Studies to teach a class on sustainable development and international economic law as part of their Summer School on Comparative Law Methodology (“Metodología de la comparación jurídica”).  Professor Trujillo’s presentation on Sustainable Development and International Trade Law: Challenges and Possibilities (“El Desarrollo Sostenible y el Derecho Internacional en lo Comercial: Los Desafios y las Posibilidades”) was taught in Spanish and online, including an estimated 60 students located in Europe, Mexico, and Latin America.  The two-week course (in person and online) is offered yearly with the purpose to connect with graduate students and legal professionals studying in or working on issues connected with Latin America.

Professor Trujillo’s participation is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Bologna Department of Political and Social Sciences which will culminate in a Memorandum of Agreement between the University of Houston Law Center and University of Bologna. This Agreement will allow for more faculty exchanges and research collaborations in the future, in addition to student opportunities.  

Course Information

 

Professor Trujillo teaching

On May 3, Professor Trujillo presented at a workshop at the Rice University Baker Institute for Public Policy on the “USMCA and the Environment.”  This was part of a grant-funded research project for which she was invited to partake entitled,  “Trends in Global and Regional Trade: The View from North America.” This project is funded by the Charles Koch Foundation and organized by the Baker Institute’s Center for the US and Mexico and is planned to culminate in a report on the achievements so far of the new NAFTA, the USMCA. 

GLPA 2021-2022 webinar series on 2020 Global Pandemic

Watch talks and read news stories by clicking here.

Mexican Mid-Term Election Fends Off Nationalization Fears For Energy Sector

Webinar hosted by UH Law Center’s Initiative on Global Law and Policy details how pandemic led to international expansions of executive power

Professor Julian Cardenas Garcia was quoted in a Forbes article discussing how Mexico’s June mid-term election has fended off nationalization fears for the energy sector.

U.S. Department of Energy official to discuss energy justice at conference hosted by UHLC's EENR Center

CHAIR: Sabrina Ragone, University of Bologna
MODERATOR and DISCUSSANT: Frank Garcia, Boston College Law School
SPEAKER: Gabrielle Marceau, University of Geneva and WTO
DISCUSSANT: Elizabeth Trujillo, University of Houston

May 10, 2021 - Shalanda H. Baker, the first-ever Deputy Director for Energy Justice at the U.S. Department of Energy, will serve as the keynote speaker at the Environment, Energy & Natural Resources Center's 5th Annual North American Environment, Energy, & Natural Resources Conference, which will be held virtually. The conference, "Environmental Social Governance (ESG): Major Mover Towards Sustainable Energy Future," will begin at 8:30 a.m. on Tuesday.

Announcing GLPA Affiliated Professor, Zachary D. Kaufman’s ASIL Roundtable on Black Lives Matter and International Human Rights Law: The Challenge of Systemic Racism
Friday, March 26 at 1:45 pm – 2:45 pm EDT.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were inspired by the need to end racist violence by police and federal agents, but the movement has the much larger goal of challenging not just individual racist acts, but systemic cultural, political, legal, and economic bias in the United States. Racist violence is not an arbitrary, spontaneous series of isolated incidents, but a symptom of deep-seated historical inequalities and biases in U.S. culture and the economic system. International human rights law (IHRL) is often thought of as a system of discrete individual rights, but IHRL also imposes broad duties on states to address the root inequalities and biases that create and sustain racial injustice and racist attitudes. Understanding the nature of the underlying problems requires delving into social science, particularly the social psychology of implicit bias and the macroeconomics of racial justice. 

This roundtable has two objectives. First, it will draw on diverse social science research to explore the origin and operation of systemic racism in the United States that gave rise to the BLM movement. Second, the roundtable will analyze how IHRL obligates states to address these systemic problems.”

Speakers include, in addition to Zachary D. Kaufman as moderator :

- Ahilan Arulanantham, Professor from Practice and Co-Faculty Director, Center for Immigration Law and Policy, UCLA
- Jordan Robert Axt, Assistant Professor of Psychology, McGill University and Director of Data and Methodology, Project Implicit
- Anna Spain Bradley, Professor of Law and Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, UCLA
- Reginald Noël, Economist, U.S. Department of Labor

For more information, please go to: https://www.asil.org/community/human-rights

Webinar — Improving the Environment Under the USMCA

This webinar — the fourth in the series on the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) — featured a discussion of the USMCA’s chapter on the environment, which incorporates major improvements over NAFTA. Most observers agree that the new provisions, if implemented in good faith, could contribute to environmental improvements in such diverse areas as marine and forest resource management and air quality.

UH Law Center Launches Global Law and Policy Program

GLPA

Dec. 16, 2020 – The University of Houston Law Center has established the Initiative on Global Law and Policy for the Americas (GLPA), aimed at uniting academics, practitioners and policy makers to develop research, coursework and collaboration in the areas of international and comparative law.