Professor Alejandro E. Camacho

Alejandro Camacho is Chancellor's Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine, and Faculty Director of the UCI Law Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources.

Professor Camacho has taught courses in environmental law, environmental ethics, regulatory and institutional design, and property. His scholarship explores the goals, structures, and processes of regulation, with a particular focus on natural resources and public lands law, pollution control law, and land use regulation. His writing considers the role of public participation and scientific expertise in regulation, the allocation of authority and relationships between regulatory institutions, and how the design and goals of legal institutions must and can be reshaped to more effectively account for emerging technologies and the dynamic character of natural and human systems.

His legal scholarship includes articles published or forthcoming in the Yale Journal on Regulation, Washington University Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Stanford Environmental Law Journal, North Carolina Law Review, Harvard Journal on Legislation, Emory Law Journal, Colorado Law Review, Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, and BYU Law Review. Professor Camacho is the co-author, with fellow CPR Member Scholar Robert Glicksman, of Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework, published by NYU Press in 2019.

Professor Camacho’s interdisciplinary research involves collaborations with experts in ecology, land use planning, political science, computer science, genetics, philosophy, and sociology. He was a co-investigator on National Science Foundation-funded research developing a collaborative cyber-infrastructure for facilitating climate change adaptation. His scientific publications include articles in BioScience, the Journal of Applied Ecology, Issues in Science and Technology, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He is a frequent public speaker and has contributed opinion pieces or interviews for various print and radio news outlets (including the Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, The Australian, Discover, Nature Climate Change, Bloomberg, Businessweek, HuffPost, Mother Jones, The Hill, and National Public Radio stations).

Professor Camacho also serves as the inaugural Director of the UCI Law Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources, which seeks to promote policy-relevant research and public engagement through conferences, lectures, publications, and stakeholder facilitation on a variety of regional and national environmental issues. He is a Scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit think tank devoted to issues of environmental protection and safety. He is on the Executive Committee of UCI OCEANS, and holds a courtesy appointment in Political Science at UCI’s School of Social Sciences. He is the former chair of the Association of American Law Schools’ Section on Natural Resources.

In Fall 2017, Professor Camacho was the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at the Yale Law School. Before joining UCI, Professor Camacho was an Associate Professor at the Notre Dame Law School, a research fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center, and practiced environmental and land use law.