César Rodríguez Garavito is an international human rights and environmental law scholar and practitioner. He is a Professor of Clinical Law and Chair of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at New York University School of Law. He is the founding director of the Future of Rights and Governance program (FORGE), the Earth Rights Research & Action (TERRA) Clinic, and the More-Than-Human Rights program (MOTH) at NYU Law. He is the editor-in-chief of Open Global Rights. His current work sits at the intersection of ecology, technology and the law, with an emphasis on the legal opportunities and risks posed by AI-assisted studies of animal communication.
A lawyer and a sociologist by training, Rodríguez-Garavito is the author of numerous books and articles on a wide range of topics, including the future of the human rights movement, climate litigation, socio-environmental conflicts, Indigenous rights, intellectual property, and business and human rights. He has been a strategy advisor for leading international and domestic social justice organizations, as well as pioneered the use of design thinking, foresight and other innovation tools in the human rights space.
Rodríguez-Garavito has been a visiting professor at Stanford Law School, Brown University, the University of Melbourne, the University of Pretoria (South Africa), and the Getulio Vargas Foundation (Brazil). He has been an Associate Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Socio-Legal Research and the Global Justice and Human Rights Program at the University of the Andes (Colombia), and has served as director of Dejusticia.
He has served as expert witness of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an Adjunct Judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, and a lead litigator in climate change, socioeconomic rights and indigenous rights cases.
Rodríguez Garavito holds a Ph.D. and an M.S. (Sociology) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.A. from NYU’s Institute for Law and Society, an M.A. (Philosophy) from the National University of Colombia, and a J.D. from the University of los Andes.