Elizabeth Trujillo

Elizabeth Trujillo is the Mary Ann & Lawrence E. Faust Professor of Law and the Founding Director, Initiative on Global Law and Policy for the Americas, who specializes in international trade and investment law, sustainable development and energy, contracts, and international law. Immediately prior to UH, Professor Trujillo was a Professor of Law at Texas A&M University School of Law where she was also the co-convener for their new Global and Comparative Law Program and an Affiliated Faculty member with the Texas A&M University Energy Institute. She also was a Professor of Law at Suffolk University School of Law in Boston where she also served as co-director of their International Law Concentration, a Visiting Professor at Florida State University School of Law, and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University Law School. Prior to entering academia, she worked for the Houston office of the New York law firm LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene and MacRae (later known as Dewey and LeBoeuf) in the areas of corporate law, project finance and international business transactions, with an emphasis on energy and Latin America.

Her publications, which have appeared in top 50 law reviews, books, and peer-reviewed journals, examine the relationship between international trade and investment with domestic regulatory structures, specifically in the areas of energy and the environment, sustainable development, and international consumer protection law. Her recent research focuses more specifically on the trade implications of local decarbonization strategies in national efforts to mitigate for environmental challenges. Due to her expertise on NAFTA and international trade, she has been interviewed by media outlets including the Dallas Morning News and Bloomberg BNA News, and most recently, invited to be part of the NSF Engineering Research Center funded grant Team on Resiliency Enhancement and Disaster-Impact Interception (READII) in the Manufacturing Sector. This research project, sponsored by Texas A&M University Energy Institute and Texas A&M University Engineering Experiment Station and partnered by other academic institutions such as the University of Texas, Louisiana State University, Florida Atlantic University, Mississippi State University, and Tuskegee University, will focus on Gulf Coast disaster control strategies for the manufacturing sector.

Professor Trujillo was awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship to write her book, Reimagining Trade through a Sustainable Development Framework, which will be published with Cambridge University Press in 2020. In furtherance of this book project, she has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) in Heidelberg, Germany.

In 2017, Professor Trujillo was elected to the American Law Institute and in 2018, to the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law where she also serves on the Strategic Initiatives and Book Awards Committees. The Massachusetts Association of Hispanic Attorneys named Professor Trujillo “Latina Trailblazer in the Law” in 2012. She currently serves on the Action Committee of the Texas Bar International Law Section.

Selected Publications

• Balancing Sustainability, the Right to Regulate, and the Need for Investor Protection: Lessons from the Trade Regime, 59 Boston College Law Review 2734 (2018)

• Chapter on International Trade and Deep Decarbonization in the U.S. (part of U.S. Deep Decarbonization Pathways Project), LEGAL PATHWAYS TO DEEP DECARBONIZATION IN THE UNITED STATES, Michael B. Gerrard and John C. Dernbach, eds. (Environmental Law Institute publication) (2018)

• Regulatory Cooperation in International Trade & its Transformative Effects on Executive Power, 25 Ind. J. of Global Legal Studies 365 (2018) (25th Anniversary Edition, by invitation only)

• A Dialogical Approach to Trade and Environment, 16 JIEL 3 (Oxford University Press) (Fall 2013) (Peer Review)

COURSES:

• Contracts
• International Trade
• NAFTA
• Trade, Investment, and Development
• Trends in International Law and Sustainable Development