About
Alice Farmer is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Maine and a Senior Adviser for Climate Rights International. For over a decade she was a lawyer with UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, in offices around the world including the United States.
Across twenty years she has worked on refugee protection and the rights of people in displacement, in the field and in the courts. Her research now asks how climate change is reshaping the international legal framework of forced displacement, with a focus on small-scale fishing communities and other coastal populations living with slow-onset loss.
Until January 2024 she was head of the United States legal team for UNHCR, where she oversaw strategic litigation and policy analysis, drafted the agency's legal positions, and represented it before the US Supreme Court and the federal courts of appeals. She was also UNHCR's focal point for climate change, and led its work on access to counsel for people seeking asylum. Her field service with UNHCR includes deployment as Senior Protection Officer in Chişinău, Moldova at the onset of the Ukrainian refugee emergency; refugee status determination across the Caribbean; and protection cluster lead in Liberia.
Before UNHCR she worked as an international human rights lawyer for Human Rights Watch, the ACLU, and the Norwegian Refugee Council. At Human Rights Watch she created and led the organisation's global campaign to end the immigration detention of children, carrying out field investigations in more than twelve countries. Her research took her into detention centres and refugee camps in Malta, Indonesia, Greece, Italy and Thailand, and into public schools across the American South.
She was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and a Visiting Fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. She is building a climate change law lab, and is co-editing Climate Change, Migration, Gender, and the Law, forthcoming from Edward Elgar.
Teaching
She has lectured on human rights at Harvard Law School, Harvard Kennedy School, New York University School of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, and the Institut d'études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po).
Education
- JD, New York University School of Law
- MPA, Harvard Kennedy School of Government
- BA, Harvard College
Other
She serves on the boards of the Bromley Charitable Trust, an environmental philanthropic
foundation, and Coexistence Story. She speaks French.