On Tuesday, April 5, 2011, the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice and the Center for Global Energy, International Arbitration, and Environmental Law will host a Human Rights Happy Hour featuring Professor Judith Kimerling of the City University of New York, who will present a lecture entitled “Oil, Litigation and Conservation in the Amazon Rainforest in Ecuador: Can Cowode Law Protect the Rights of Indigenous Huaorani in the Oil Patch and Yasuni Biosphere Reserve?”
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will take place from 3:30 p.m.–5:30 p.m. in TNH 3.126 at the University of Texas School of Law.
Judith Kimerling is a professor of law and policy at the City University of New York, with a joint appointment at CUNY Law School and Queens College. Her research focuses on the environmental and social impact of oil development in the Amazon rainforest. In addition to working directly with indigenous populations, she has also served as an environmental litigator and as an assistant attorney general for New York State. Her book, Amazon Crude, had a significant impact on both international environmental and human rights policy agendas and prompted a well-known class action lawsuit, Aguinda v. Texaco, Inc.
Kimerling received the Field Museum’s 2007 Parker/Gentry Award, has been a visiting scholar at Yale Law School, and received a Special Achievement Award from Rainforest Action Network and a Feliks Gross Endowment Award for Outstanding Scholarly Achievement from CUNY Academy for Humanities and Sciences. She holds a JD from Yale Law School and a BA from the University of Michigan.
For more information about Professor Kimerling, including background readings related to the presentation, please visit the Rapoport Center website.
Contact: William Chandler, Bernard and Audre Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, 512-232-4857, or wchandler@law.utexas.edu