Alice Hamilton Farmer
Law Professor · Adviser · Writer
Climate displacement · Coastal communities · Refugee protection ·
Latest
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CommentaryThe Aftermath of Mullin v. Doe: Better Protections Needed for Climate-Displaced Haitians
On the Supreme Court decision stripping Temporary Protected Status from more than 300,000 Haitians, and the case for permanent, tailored legal pathways drawing on the CARICOM Free Movement Agreement and the Cartagena Declaration.
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MediaConfronting Climate Migration Crises
Podcast conversation on the legal and policy response to climate-driven displacement.
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ArticlesDisasters in Slow Motion: Why Climate Displacement Tests International Legal Frameworks, and What to Do About It
Reconceives climate displacement as a long problem rather than a short-term emergency, through two case studies: small-scale fishing communities in the global south, and residential property in the United States.
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ArticlesThe Discretion Loophole: Executive Power, International Refugee Law, and the Erosion of Asylum Protections in the United States
Argues that successive administrations have used the discretion provision in US asylum law as an end-run around Congress, in conflict with international obligations.
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ArticlesMigrating with Dignity: A Human Rights Case for Facilitated, Community-Led Financial Interventions in Climate-Vulnerable Areas
Part of the Financing Climate Mobility symposium.
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ReportsBarely Surviving: Detention, Abuse, and Neglect of Migrant Children in Indonesia
Based on interviews with more than 100 migrants, including children as young as five.
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ReportsBoat Ride to Detention: Adult and Child Migrants in Malta
Documented the automatic detention of unaccompanied children pending age assessment.
In progress
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ProjectsClimate Change, Migration, Gender, and the Law
An edited volume bringing together legal scholarship on the gendered dimensions of climate-driven displacement. Under contract with Edward Elgar.
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ProjectsClimate Change Law Lab
A proof of concept for an interdisciplinary lab that would equip governments and other stakeholders with the research needed to build human-rights-centred policy responses to climate-change-induced displacement.
About Alice
Alice Hamilton Farmer is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Maine and a Senior Adviser for Climate Rights International. For twenty years she has worked on refugee protection and the rights of people in displacement — in refugee camps, detention centres and courtrooms.
For over a decade she was a lawyer with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, most recently as the head of the legal team for the United States, where she represented the agency before the US Supreme Court and the federal courts of appeals and served as focal point for climate change.
Her current research asks how climate change is reshaping the legal framework of forced displacement, with a focus on small-scale fishing communities and other coastal populations living with slow-onset loss.
Currently writing on climate displacement and building a climate change law lab.