Tracy Bach

I am Professor Tracy Bach, a law professor for 20+ years who has focused on international environmental law and climate change for the last dozen.

I began my teaching career at the Vermont Law School in 1996, where I taught and published on climate change, international environmental law and human rights, health care and environmental health law, and legal method and pedagogy. I have a BA in history from Yale University and a JD and MA in public affairs from the University of Minnesota. Luckily I clerked for the Honorable Harriet Lansing of the Minnesota Court of Appeals right after I graduated with my JD, MA, and first MOM. (Jordan was my law school baby and Matthew, my clerkship baby.)

In 2007, I began focusing my teaching and research on climate change when I became Associate Director and Senior Research Fellow of the Climate Legacy Initiative (CLI). The CLI was a two-year, grant funded research project that sought to show how existing laws that impose duties on current generations to protect future generations could apply to climate change mitigation and adaptation. The project published a white paper, Recalibrating the Law of Humans with the Laws of Nature: Climate Change, Human Rights, and Intergenerational Justice, in 2009. That year, I traveled to COP15 in Copenhagen – my first COP – to present its key findings at a side event organized by the EU on the “young and future generations” thematic day.

I have had the good fortune to teach around the world, both in French and English. I was a visiting professor at the law faculties of the National University of Rwanda and Petrozavodsk State University (Karelia, Russia) during the 2002-03 academic year. I taught intensive courses in French every spring from 2005-10 at the University of Paris 13. I spent the 2009-10 academic year as a Fulbright Scholar at the law, economics, and political science faculty of Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Senegal. Most recently I spent the spring 2015 semester as a visiting professor at Qatar University College of Law. In addition to teaching globally at law schools, I have conducted workshops and consulted in China and Myanmar with IUCN, UNDP, and UNEP.

My profession has given me a lot, so playing it forward is important to me. I have served on Fulbright peer review selection committees since returning from Senegal. I volunteer as the Co-Focal Point of the Research and Independent Non-Governmental Organizations (RINGO) constituency of the UNFCCC Secretariat. Closer to home, I serve as a trustee on the board that governs the local non-profit visiting nurse association that provides home health and hospice care to thousands of people.

Education

• Master of Public Policy Humphrey School of Public Affairs (1990 — 1994)
• Doctor of Law - JD University of Minnesota Law School (1989 — 1994)
• Bachelor of Arts - BA Yale University (1980 — 1984)
• Course Work for Master in French Language and Civilization New York University in Paris (1984)