Raquel E. Aldana is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity at UC Davis and a Professor of Law at the School of Law. She joined UC Davis in 2017.
Aldana is a graduate of Arizona State University (earning a bachelor’s degree in English and another in Spanish) and Harvard Law School. She was a professor at the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, before joining the McGeorge School of Law faculty in 2009.
Her scholarship has focused on transitional justice, criminal justice reforms, and sustainable development in Latin America, as well as immigrant rights in the United States. She has taught immigration law and international human rights, lawyering for immigrants, “crimmigration,” criminal law and procedure, international labor law, Latin American comparative law, international public law, international human rights, statutes and regulations, and the Central American migration corridor.
She founded and directed the McGeorge School of Law’s Inter-American Program, which trains bilingual and bicultural lawyers for transnational careers or to work with the growing Latino population in the United States. She served as the school’s associate dean for faculty scholarship, 2013-17.
She is co-editing From Extraction to Emancipation: Development Reimagined, a forthcoming book from the American Bar Association. She serves on the Latin American and Caribbean Council of the ABA’s Rule of Law Initiative, and was recently elected to the Council for Racial and Ethic Diversity in the Educational Pipeline. Aldana is a Fellow of the American Bar Association, previously served as the co-president of the Society of American Law Teachers, and was a Fulbright Scholar in Guatemala in 2006 and 2007.