Featured Faculty: Alejandro Camacho

“I am one of those few people who went into law school with a strong inclination towards a particular area of the law,” says Associate Professor Alex Camacho. “I knew from the beginning I wanted to do environmental law, or at least go into a field where I could pursue environmental protection.”

Growing up in southern California, Camacho developed a love of the outdoors and a keen sense that economic development must be balanced with careful stewardship of natural resources and ecosystems. Environmental law, he says, “was an interesting way to marry my interest in some of the scientific issues with real policy questions. The law is really the place where the rubber hits the road, if you will—it’s where policy and science actually affect human conduct.”

Before joining the Notre Dame Law School faculty in 2005, Camacho spent five years as an attorney in the environment, land, and resource department at Latham & Watkins, a prominent Los Angeles law firm. That experience exposed him to “cutting-edge issues” and provided real-life case studies for his subsequent teaching and research on land use and environmental law.

Camacho’s scholarship focuses on regulatory innovation, and particularly approaches that involve communities, governments, and developers in joint decisions affecting the environment. “Whether you look at land-use decisions at the local level or environmental questions at the state and federal level, there is a growing recognition that traditional forms of regulation are limited. They are often critiqued as inefficient and lacking public involvement. What I’m fascinated with is trying to come up with processes that are more collaborative and more effective,” he says.

Looking at big-picture issues like climate change, Camacho argues for a process that he calls “regulatory learning,” so that environmental laws and programs can be adapted to account for lessons learned through monitoring and evaluation. “We still have much to learn about the effects and challenges of climate change, and governmental institutions should be structured to push regulators to monitor and adapt their decisions over time.”

Camacho loves the interdisciplinary nature of his work, and relishes opportunities to share his research beyond academia so that it might have a broader impact. “It’s an area where law, policy, science, ethics, economics all converge and have input into decisions and issues that affect the environment. I often tell my students that you don’t need to be an expert in each of those different fields to understand environmental law. But all these disciplines inform the discussion in a different way,” he says.

“The next generation of environmental lawyers will have to guide their clients through some very difficult questions, regardless of who they’re representing,” Camacho adds. “It’s an area of the law that is growing, and lawyers will play the pivotal roles in helping address these new environmental challenges.”

To learn more about Alejandro Camacho, visit his faculty profile page.