WASHINGTON, DC, June 17, 2002 — The National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA) is pleased to announce that the University of Texas Law School Henry Oswald Centennial Professor of Real Property Law Gerald Torres is this year's keynote speaker for the 2002 Substantive Law Conference, July 24-28, at The Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

Torres previously served as vice provost and associate dean of the University of Texas Law School and is an accomplished writer and academic in the civil rights and environmental law fields. Prior to joining the faculty of Texas, Torres served in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) as the first deputy assistant attorney general for environment and natural resources and then as counsel to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno. While working for the DOJ, Torres developed Executive Order 12898 on Environmental Justice and established the Office of Tribal Justice to address Indian legal issues. In addition, he served on the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, a committee of the Environmental Protection Agency.

He is one of the first legal scholars to address the disparate impact of environmental regulation on different racial, ethnic and socio-economic groups. He has been directly involved in the debate over the management and legal protection of Native American land and religion and is knowledgeable of every kind of environmental law, including air pollution, agriculture, wetlands, public lands, biodiversity, groundwater, endangered species, water rights, takings and international law.

In addition, Torres is one of the leaders in the development of Agricultural Law. He was integrally involved in reforming farm finance law in Minnesota during the farm crisis of the early to mid-1980s and helped design the Minnesota statute regulating agricultural contamination of ground water.

Torres has written and lectured extensively on the intersection of issues of race and politics. In this field, he has focused his scholarly study and expertise on the uses to which race and ethnicity are put for purposes of legal argument and for the construction of social policy, specifically democratic representation. He recently co-authored a book with Harvard Law Professor Lani Guinier, THE MINERS CANARY: Rethinking Race and Power, on these topics (www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/GUIMIN.html). Torres will be available for book signing before and after the keynote plenary session on July 25.

In his capacity of law professor at the University of Texas Law School, Torres is involved with school reform and planning for diversity in the wake of the elimination of affirmative action. He also has served the local Austin community as the president of the board of directors of the Austin Children’s Museum.

Torres is a graduate of Stanford University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and received his Juris Doctorate from Yale Law School and his LL.M. from the University of Michigan.

For more information, contact Cynthia Works, NLADA senior counsel, at (202) 452-0620 ext. 220 or via e-mail at c.works@nlada.org.

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The National Legal Aid & Defender Association (NLADA), founded in 1911, is the oldest and largest national, nonprofit membership organization devoting all of its resources to advocating equal access to justice for all Americans. NLADA champions effective legal assistance for people who cannot afford counsel, serves as a collective voice for both civil legal services and public defense services throughout the nation and provides a wide range of services and benefits to its individual and organizational members.