Luz Estella Nagle

Nagle-Spanish Bio-December 2010-PDF

Professor Luz E. Nagle specializes in international law and international criminal law.  Her unique career prior to teaching includes confronting drug lords as a judge in Medellín, Colombia, working as an undercover private investigator in Southern California, clerking for the Supreme Court of Virginia, and pursuing software pirates in Latin America for Microsoft Corporation.

She received her LL.D. from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana, a J.D. from the College of William & Mary, and an LL.M. (international law) and M.A. (Latin American studies) from UCLA.  She also holds certifications in national security law from the University of Virginia School of Law’s Center for National Security Law.  She has been a visiting professor and lecturer at the University of Tampa, the Universidad de Granada (Spain), the Copenhagen Business School (Denmark), the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), EAFIT (Colombia), the Universidad de Antioquia (Colombia), and serves as an External Researcher in the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College.

Professor Nagle has participated in several rule of law, judicial reform, and hemispheric security projects sponsored by USAID and the U.S. Departments of Defense, Justice, and State throughout Latin America, and include training the Argentine judiciary on human trafficking and the accusatory criminal justice system, teaching trial skills to Colombian criminal law professors, addressing the deployment of land mines by illegal armed groups in Andean states with the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, and working with the Staff Judge Advocate’s Office of the U.S. Southern Command in training Colombian military commanders and staff judge advocates at the brigade and division levels in the application of international humanitarian law in operational zones of conflict. More recently, she has worked with the U.S. State Department as a presenter on various topics of international law and the rule of law to government, non-government, and military officials from more than two dozen nations under the State Department’s Distinguished Foreign Visitor’s Program, and as a State Department-sponsored visiting lecturer on international humanitarian law and national security in the Diplomate Program in Security and Northern Border Development at the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León Facultad de Derecho y Criminología in Monterrey, Mexico.

An active participant in bar associations and learned legal societies, Professor Nagle has held several committee appointments in the American Bar Association and currently sits on the ABA’s Criminal Justice Council.  She was a member of the ABA’s Task Force on the Vienna Convention on Consular Affairs, and served on the Corruption and the Rule of Law Working Group and was a contributor to the Working Group’s White Paper on Corruption and the Rule of Law (2007).  She is also active in the American Association of Law Schools and currently sits on the AALS Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Teachers Committee.

Professor Nagle’s activities at the international level include her current position on the International Bar Association’s Legal Practice Division Council, following significant leadership appointments in the IBA’s Criminal Law Section.  She also served on the IBA’s Task Force on the Rule of Law and on the IBA’s Task Force on Terrorism, and she has been involved in drafting several IBA resolutions and model rules for criminal justice reform at the international level.  In January 2012, she was appointed to represent the IBA’s Anti-Corruption Committee in the IBA’s Anti-Corruption Guidance for Bar Associations Working Group, which is dedicated to encouraging bar associations and legal societies to commit to fighting corruption through proactive steps including education, empowerment and accountability.

Distinguished elected memberships include the American Law Institute, the Committee on Teaching International Law of the American Branch of the International Law Association (ABILA), L’Association Internationale de Droit Pénal (AIDP), the International Network to Promote the Rule of Law (INPROL), the Academia Mexicana de Derecho Internacional Privado y Comparado, and the Tampa Chapter of the Committee on Foreign Relations.

Professor Nagle has published in English and Spanish on four continents, including book chapters, law review articles, and monographs on topics related to international humanitarian law and internal armed conflict, transnational crime, corruption, national security, and rule of law/judicial reform movements, and her work is widely read and well regarded beyond the legal academy.

Deeply involved in the global fight against human trafficking and modern day slavery, Professor Nagle was a member of the Florida Governor’s Task Force on Human Trafficking to develop legal and political policy for fighting human trafficking in Florida.  She is a recipient of the 2009 Freedom Award by the Florida Coalition against Human Trafficking, and has been recognized by the California State Senate for her activism and involvement in training law enforcement personnel and legal professionals about best practices for combating this growing transborder crime.  She has also been honored by the University of Minnesota School of Law for her human rights advocacy, which includes serving as an expert witness in more than 70 political asylum cases involving refugees fleeing persecution in Colombia and Central America.