UCLA School of Law is pleased to welcome Alejandro Camacho, a renowned regulatory scholar, as a professor of law.

Camacho will be a core faculty member of the Emmett Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and a faculty associate of UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center. He comes from UC Irvine School of Law, where he was Chancellor’s Professor of Law and faculty director of the Center for Land, Environment, and Natural Resources.

Camacho’s scholarship investigates the processes, institutions, and goals of the law. His work considers the role of expertise and community in government decision-making, the tradeoffs of different allocations of regulatory authority, and how legal goals and institutions can be reshaped to better account for emerging technologies and the dynamic character of natural and human systems. Beyond environmental law, he has produced publications in property, local government, food safety, public health, and tribal law.

Camacho’s research has garnered accolades particularly due to its interdisciplinary impact. He has published articles in the UCLA Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Vanderbilt Law Review, and many other leading legal and scientific journals. His books include Reorganizing Government: A Functional and Dimensional Framework (NYU Press, 2019), co-written with Robert Glicksman, and casebooks on property and environmental law. His forthcoming book Lessons for a Warming Planet: A Vital History of U.S. Environmental Law (NYU Press, 2026), co-authored with Brigham Daniels, will be released in April. He has received millions to support research at the intersection of law and ecology, urban planning, political science, and philosophy.

Camacho also serves as a board member of the Center for Progressive Reform, and he has hosted many roundtables that have advanced policy on emerging environmental issues. He is a member of the American Law Institute and a fellow of the American Bar Foundation. He previously served as the Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School and as a professor at Notre Dame Law School.

He earned two B.A. degrees at UC Irvine, in political science and criminology, law, and society, both summa cum laude, and his J.D. at Harvard Law School, cum laude.