Biography
Elizabeth Trujillo is the Mary Ann & Lawrence E. Faust Professor of Law and the Founding Director of the Initiative on Global Law and Policy for the Americas. She writes and teaches in international trade and investment law, sustainable development and energy, contracts, and international law. Her publications which can be found in leading law reviews, books, and peer journals, examine the legal and policy overlaps between international trade and investment and domestic regulatory processes, specifically in the areas of energy, the environment, and sustainable development. Her more recent work focuses on the trade considerations for domestic decarbonization strategies in the context of changing international economic legal frameworks, with an emphasis on the Americas, and on the models for international trade policy that better serve sustainable development principles.
Recent samples of her work can be found in the Journal of International Economic Law (OUP), Duke Journal of International and Comparative Law, Boston College Law Review, and Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (peer review). Her Chapter on International Trade and Deep Decarbonization in the U.S. in Legal Pathways to Deep Decarbonization in the United States published by the Environmental Law Institute in 2018, is part of the U.S. Deep Decarbonization Pathway Project, developed by the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network as a global collaboration of leading research institutions around the world working on policy proposals for national decarbonization strategies.
Professor Trujillo has been the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship and is writing a book on Shattered Prisms: Reconceptualizing Trade through a Sustainable Development Framework, which will be published with Cambridge University Press. Prior to joining UH Law Faculty, Professor Trujillo was Full Professor at Texas A&M University School of Law and a Full Professor at Suffolk University Law School in Boston. She has visited at Harvard Law School, Florida State University, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Germany, and the University of Bologna in Italy. She remains an affiliate of the Texas A&M Energy Institute. In 2012, the Massachusetts Association of Hispanic Professors named her “Latina Trailblazer in the Law.”
Professor Trujillo has served on the Executive Council of the American Society of International Law, and serves on the UH Faculty Senate and UH Faculty Governance Committee. Prior to teaching, Professor Trujillo practiced law in LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene, and MacRae (later Dewey and LeBoeuf) in the areas international energy, project finance, international business and investment with a focus on Mexico and Latin America. Professor Trujillo is an elected member of the American Law Institute.
