Professor Aldana, Erik Nilsen '25, Abigail Kamba Kamba '26 Travel to Justice Conference
Over spring break, Professor Raquel Aldana traveled with two students, Erik Nilsen ’25 and Abigail Kamba Kamba ’26, to the University of Dayton (Ohio) for the inaugural US-COPAJU (U.S. chapter of the Committee of Pan American Judges on Social Justice) conference.
The two students, along with Victoria Morales O’Connor ’25, helped Aldana prepare her talk for the conference via an Aoki Center for Critical Race & Nation Studies independent study course. Aldana’s talk, “Judicial Codes of Ethics in the Americas: Guatemala as a Case Study,” corresponded with the conference’s theme of “The Crucial Role of Courts as the Final Safeguard of Democracy.”
Along with conducting legal research, the three students interviewed three of the more than 100 judges and advocates for justice in exile from Guatemala. One of the judges, Erika Aifán, met with the students at the conference. Aifán received the U.S. State Department’s International Woman of Courage Award in 2021.
Raquel E. Aldana joined UC Davis in 2017 to serve as the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Diversity with a law faculty appointment. She returned to full-time law teaching in 2020. Aldana’s research has focused on transitional justice, criminal justice reforms and sustainable development in Latin America, as well as immigrant rights. Before UC Davis, Aldana was a professor of law at McGeorge School of Law, and the William S. Boyd School of Law, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She served as associate dean for faculty scholarship at McGeorge from 2013-17. She is a graduate of Arizona State University and Harvard Law School.
