Professor
Alejandro
E.
Camacho
Alejandro Camacho is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, where he teaches courses in property, natural resources law, and environmental law. His research often explores the goals, structures, and processes of regulation, with a particular focus on natural resources law, public lands law, pollution control law, and land use regulation. His writing generally seeks to reconsider the role of public participation and scientific expertise in regulation, the allocation of authority between public institutions, and how the law's goals and strategies must and can be reshaped to effectively account for emerging technologies and the dynamic character of natural and human systems. Before joining UCLA, Professor Camacho was Chancellor's Professor of Law and the Faculty Director of the Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources at UC Irvine School of Law; an Associate Professor at the Notre Dame Law School; a research fellow at the Georgetown University Law Center; and practiced environmental and land use law. In Fall 2017, he was the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at the Yale Law School.
Camacho received a B.A. summa cum laude in Political Science and a B.A. summa cum laude in Criminology, Law, and Society from the University of California, Irvine; a J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School; and an LL.M from Georgetown University Law Center. Professor Camacho is an elected member of the American Law Institute and an elected fellow of the American Bar Foundation; on the Board of Directors and a Scholar at the Center for Progressive Reform, a nonprofit think tank devoted to responsive government, environmental and health protections, and climate action; and the former chair of the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Natural Resources. He is a frequent public speaker and has contributed opinion pieces or interviews for various print and radio news outlets (including the Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Denver Post, The Australian, Discover, Nature Climate Change, Bloomberg, Businessweek, HuffPost, Mother Jones, The Hill, Washington Post and National Public Radio stations).
Camacho's award-winning legal scholarship includes articles published in the Virginia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, Washington University Law Review, Emory Law Journal, BYU Law Review, North Carolina Law Review, Colorado Law Review, Ohio State Law Journal, Yale Journal on Regulation, Harvard Journal on Legislation, Stanford Environmental Law Journal, Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, Regulation & Governance and Law, Innovation, & Technology. He is the co-author of Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework (NYU Press 2019); Property: Cases & Materials, Fifth Edition (Aspen 2022), and Environmental Protection: Law and Policy, Ninth Edition (Aspen 2023); and Lessons for a Warming Planet: History of U.S. Law and the Environment (forthcoming 2026). Professor Camacho's interdisciplinary research has involved collaborations with experts in ecology, land use planning, political science, computer science, genetics, philosophy, and sociology. He is the principal investigator on the Integrated and Equitable Climate Action project, which aims to align local plans with California's climate mandates while developing best practices for effective and equitable adaptation planning. His scientific publications include articles published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, BioScience, the Journal of Applied Ecology, Frontiers in Climate, and Issues in Science and Technology.