Gerald Torres is a professor at the Yale School of the Environment and the Yale Law School. He is the former Association of American Law Schools President and has taught at Stanford and Harvard Law Schools. Professor Torres served as Counsel to the Attorney General on environmental matters and Indian affairs at the U.S. Department of Justice. Professor Torres served on the Board of the Environmental Law Institute and the EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council and was the founding chairman of the Advancement Project. He is board chair of Earth Day and a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council. He was a consultant to the United Nations on environmental matters. Torres is a life member of the American Law Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations.
He has done groundbreaking work in agricultural law and policy, especially on the environmental regulation of food and fiber production. He has written in the area of water resource management. While continuing to focus on the role of social movements in producing durable legal change, Torres is finishing a book on environmental justice. An internationally known scholar of Indian law, Torres has recently focused on cooperative resource management between tribes, the states, and the federal government, and the changing legal landscape within American colonies.