Carmen Gonzalez
Carmen G. Gonzalez is the Morris I. Leibman Professor of Law at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. She writes in the areas of international environmental law, environmental justice, human rights and the environment, and food security. After graduating from Yale University and Harvard Law School, Professor Gonzalez 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 (EPA). Professor Gonzalez was a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge 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 and/or worked on environmental law projects in Europe, Latin America, and Asia. In 2017, she served as the George Soros Visiting Chair at the Central European University School of Public Policy in Budapest, Hungary and as the Norton Rose Fulbright Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Houston Law Center. In 2019, she was selected as Vermont Law School's Distinguished International Environmental Law Scholar.
Professor Gonzalez is active in a variety of professional organizations. In 2016, she was elected to the Governing Board of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Academy of Environmental Law (IUCNAEL). She served as Chair of the Environmental Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, co-chair of the IUCNAEL's Research Committee, and member of the Board of Trustees of Earthjustice. She is currently a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform, a non-profit research and educational organization 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), and has represented non-governmental organizations in multilateral environmental treaty negotiations.
Phone: (312) 915-7044
Address: Loyola University Chicago School of Law
25 East Pearson Street
Chicago, IL 60611
Professor Gonzalez is active in a variety of professional organizations. In 2016, she was elected to the Governing Board of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature Academy of Environmental Law (IUCNAEL). She served as Chair of the Environmental Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools, co-chair of the IUCNAEL's Research Committee, and member of the Board of Trustees of Earthjustice. She is currently a member scholar of the Center for Progressive Reform, a non-profit research and educational organization 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), and has represented non-governmental organizations in multilateral environmental treaty negotiations.
Phone: (312) 915-7044
Address: Loyola University Chicago School of Law
25 East Pearson Street
Chicago, IL 60611
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Books by Carmen Gonzalez
The downloadable document includes the table of contents, the contributor biographies, the foreword by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and the introductory chapter by the editors.
The uploaded document consists of the book’s cover page, table of contents, foreword, and introduction.
The downloadable document contains the table of contents as well as the book introduction (co-authored by Sumudu Atapattu and Carmen G. Gonzalez)
Papers by Carmen Gonzalez
The Article highlights two core features of racial capitalism: its racial stratification of humans for the purpose of profit making and its eco-destructive logic. It explains international law's complicity with these core features through legal doctrines that construct nature as property and justify the subordination of non-European peoples by portraying them as the backward and barbaric "other" who must be civilized through continuous economic, political, and military interventions. Applying these insights to the proposal to codify ecocide, the Article concludes that the proposed definition of ecocide may reinforce rather than subvert racial capitalism's core features by (1) focusing on individual culpability and spectacular acts of ecological destruction while obscuring racial capitalism’s inherently predatory, eco-destructive logic; (2) perpetuating international law’s civilizing mission through the selective prosecution of the racialized “other”; and (3) devaluing nature, subaltern communities, and world views antithetical to racial capitalism through the incorporation of cost-benefit analysis into the definition of ecocide. Recognizing the interconnectedness of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and climate change, the Article calls for reparative and restorative forms of justice instead of punitive approaches that scapegoat individuals for the structural ills of racial capitalism.
The environmental crises of the Anthropocene are deeply connected to the laws, policies, and institutions that enable a small fraction of humanity to pillage nature with impunity while imposing devastating economic and ecological consequences on the planet’s most marginalized populations.
This path-breaking volume offers a breath-takingly fresh and insightful diagnosis of the problem. The environment is the foundation of human life, and assumptions about the natural environment are embedded, implicitly or explicitly, in every area of international law. In order to understand international law’s complicity with global environmental degradation, it is necessary to deconstruct the discipline, identify fallacious and destructive assumptions, and remake the discipline by drawing upon the diverse legal traditions and values that have been subjugated by Eurocentric and anthropocentric practices, institutions, and ideologies.
This article contributes to the theory of racial capitalism by describing its historical foundations and analyzing what we believe to be its two key structural features: profit-making and race-making, for the purpose of accumulating wealth and power. We understand profit-making as the extraction of surplus value or profits through processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion, which are grounded in a politics of race-making. We understand race-making as including racial stratification, racial segregation, and the creation of sacrifice zones, which reflect the strategies and outcomes of profit-making. The structural features of racial capitalism thus are mutually constitutive: profit-making processes create and reinforce the making of racial meaning, while race-making, underwritten by white supremacy, structures and facilitates the economic processes of profit-making. Together, they constitute a global system dependent on the unbridled extraction of wealth from both humans and nature.
Law is deeply implicated in racial capitalism’s profit-making and race-making processes. The article highlights, with concrete examples, the ways that law and legal institutions shape, justify and naturalize the injustices that racial capitalism creates. For example, law defines, in part, what constitutes sovereignty, property, and citizenship; it delineates acceptable levels of environmental degradation; and it determines who is entitled to housing, health care, clean air and water, food, childcare, and a semblance of real freedom and choice (those who can pay). Among the areas of law discussed in the article are property, real estate, labor, immigration, housing, antitrust, trade, investment, environmental, and corporate law – as well as foundational principles of international law (such as sovereignty).
The essay examines the link between climate change and racial subordination from the dawn of the fossil fuel-based world economy to the present and the complicity of international law in these converging injustices. It discusses the counterhegemonic uses of international law by environmental justice movements in the Global South and the Global North and argues that lawyers have a huge role to play in solidarity with these movements and in opposition to the reckless extraction of the planet’s resources.
As the climate crisis intensifies, many movement lawyers representing marginalized communities have unwittingly become climate lawyers, and many climate lawyers seeking to forestall climate catastrophe have already or will soon become movement lawyers.
In this publication, three TWAIL-affiliated scholars (Julia Dehm, Carmen G. Gonzalez, and Usha Natarajan) respond to questions about international law praxis at a time of systemic social, economic, and ecological meltdown -- including explosive economic inequality, COVID-19, catastrophic climate change, unprecedented species extinction, toxic masculinity, resurgent white supremacy, and the threats to life and health posed by polluted air, contaminated water, and destruction of the planet's ecosystems.
This publication is based on a keynote event organized by Rose Parfitt, Luis Eslava & Marcus Gunneflo, co-directors of the International Law & Politics Collaborative Research Network, at the 2021 Law & Society Annual Meeting on 27 May 2021.
This dialogue was published in the TWAIL Review, https://twailr.com/
It is available at: https://twailr.com/meltdown-international-law-praxis-during-socio-ecological-crises/#
The downloadable document includes the table of contents, the contributor biographies, the foreword by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and the introductory chapter by the editors.
The uploaded document consists of the book’s cover page, table of contents, foreword, and introduction.
The downloadable document contains the table of contents as well as the book introduction (co-authored by Sumudu Atapattu and Carmen G. Gonzalez)
The Article highlights two core features of racial capitalism: its racial stratification of humans for the purpose of profit making and its eco-destructive logic. It explains international law's complicity with these core features through legal doctrines that construct nature as property and justify the subordination of non-European peoples by portraying them as the backward and barbaric "other" who must be civilized through continuous economic, political, and military interventions. Applying these insights to the proposal to codify ecocide, the Article concludes that the proposed definition of ecocide may reinforce rather than subvert racial capitalism's core features by (1) focusing on individual culpability and spectacular acts of ecological destruction while obscuring racial capitalism’s inherently predatory, eco-destructive logic; (2) perpetuating international law’s civilizing mission through the selective prosecution of the racialized “other”; and (3) devaluing nature, subaltern communities, and world views antithetical to racial capitalism through the incorporation of cost-benefit analysis into the definition of ecocide. Recognizing the interconnectedness of slavery, colonialism, neocolonialism, and climate change, the Article calls for reparative and restorative forms of justice instead of punitive approaches that scapegoat individuals for the structural ills of racial capitalism.
The environmental crises of the Anthropocene are deeply connected to the laws, policies, and institutions that enable a small fraction of humanity to pillage nature with impunity while imposing devastating economic and ecological consequences on the planet’s most marginalized populations.
This path-breaking volume offers a breath-takingly fresh and insightful diagnosis of the problem. The environment is the foundation of human life, and assumptions about the natural environment are embedded, implicitly or explicitly, in every area of international law. In order to understand international law’s complicity with global environmental degradation, it is necessary to deconstruct the discipline, identify fallacious and destructive assumptions, and remake the discipline by drawing upon the diverse legal traditions and values that have been subjugated by Eurocentric and anthropocentric practices, institutions, and ideologies.
This article contributes to the theory of racial capitalism by describing its historical foundations and analyzing what we believe to be its two key structural features: profit-making and race-making, for the purpose of accumulating wealth and power. We understand profit-making as the extraction of surplus value or profits through processes of exploitation, expropriation, and expulsion, which are grounded in a politics of race-making. We understand race-making as including racial stratification, racial segregation, and the creation of sacrifice zones, which reflect the strategies and outcomes of profit-making. The structural features of racial capitalism thus are mutually constitutive: profit-making processes create and reinforce the making of racial meaning, while race-making, underwritten by white supremacy, structures and facilitates the economic processes of profit-making. Together, they constitute a global system dependent on the unbridled extraction of wealth from both humans and nature.
Law is deeply implicated in racial capitalism’s profit-making and race-making processes. The article highlights, with concrete examples, the ways that law and legal institutions shape, justify and naturalize the injustices that racial capitalism creates. For example, law defines, in part, what constitutes sovereignty, property, and citizenship; it delineates acceptable levels of environmental degradation; and it determines who is entitled to housing, health care, clean air and water, food, childcare, and a semblance of real freedom and choice (those who can pay). Among the areas of law discussed in the article are property, real estate, labor, immigration, housing, antitrust, trade, investment, environmental, and corporate law – as well as foundational principles of international law (such as sovereignty).
The essay examines the link between climate change and racial subordination from the dawn of the fossil fuel-based world economy to the present and the complicity of international law in these converging injustices. It discusses the counterhegemonic uses of international law by environmental justice movements in the Global South and the Global North and argues that lawyers have a huge role to play in solidarity with these movements and in opposition to the reckless extraction of the planet’s resources.
As the climate crisis intensifies, many movement lawyers representing marginalized communities have unwittingly become climate lawyers, and many climate lawyers seeking to forestall climate catastrophe have already or will soon become movement lawyers.
In this publication, three TWAIL-affiliated scholars (Julia Dehm, Carmen G. Gonzalez, and Usha Natarajan) respond to questions about international law praxis at a time of systemic social, economic, and ecological meltdown -- including explosive economic inequality, COVID-19, catastrophic climate change, unprecedented species extinction, toxic masculinity, resurgent white supremacy, and the threats to life and health posed by polluted air, contaminated water, and destruction of the planet's ecosystems.
This publication is based on a keynote event organized by Rose Parfitt, Luis Eslava & Marcus Gunneflo, co-directors of the International Law & Politics Collaborative Research Network, at the 2021 Law & Society Annual Meeting on 27 May 2021.
This dialogue was published in the TWAIL Review, https://twailr.com/
It is available at: https://twailr.com/meltdown-international-law-praxis-during-socio-ecological-crises/#