Democratic Social Bargaining in Trade: Preserving Environmental Justice

Abstract

Regional trade agreements, dominated by the U.S. and EU models for free trade, are not only tools for economic policy.  They also are democratic bargaining instruments for various domestic and transnational stakeholders, including environmental and labor groups, effectively insulating certain social policy goals and values from local political volatility.  Despite recent executive orders overturning President Biden administration’s environmental justice initiatives, this paper posits that given expansive supply chain networks, regional and bilateral trade agreements ensure that environmental justice strategies are not dead.   The pro-business reasons that motivate eliminating environmental justice goals run up against structural aspects of regional and bilateral trade agreements that have had embedded in them various strategies for pursuing environmental justice since the days of the original NAFTA.    Regional trade agreements, like the United States Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA) which was negotiated under the first President Trump administration, have deeply embedded social policy agendas, including environmental justice goals.  Likewise, EU trade agreements preserve regional social values, as exhibited in the recently concluded EU-MERCOSUR Association Agreement which contains the Paris Climate Agreement as “an essential element” of the agreement. 

Full abstract

About the speaker

Elizabeth Trujillo is the Mary Ann & Lawrence E. Faust Professor of Law and the Founding Director of the Initiative on Global Law and Policy for the Americas.  She is currently a recipient of the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European University Institute (spring 2025).  She was Professor of Law at Texas A&M University School of Law (2016-2019), and at Suffolk University School of Law in Boston (2007-2016) where she received the 2012 Latina Trailblazer Award by the Hispanic National Bar chapter, Massachusetts Association of Hispanic Attorneys.  She has also been a Visiting Professor at Florida State University School of Law (2005-2006), a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University Law School (2011-2012), and an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law and International Law (2015-2016).  Professor Trujillo writes and teaches in international trade and investment law, USMCA, sustainable development and energy, contracts, and international law, using comparative law methods.  Her recent work, which can be found in several journals like the Journal of International Economic Law (OUP), Duke Journal of International and Comparative Law, Boston College Law Review, and Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies (peer review).   examines trade considerations for domestic decarbonization strategies in the context of changing international economic legal frameworks, environmental justice, and constitutional rights on nature, with an emphasis on the Americas, and on the models for international trade policy that better serve sustainable development principles.    She is currently working on a book with Cambridge University Press, Shattered Prisms:  Reconfiguring Trade For Sustainable Development in a Fragmented World.  She is also co-authoring a chapter entitled, Legal Transfers in International Trade: Linking the Local with Global for an Oxford University Press book, Comparative Trade Law.  In 2024, she received the Global Faculty Award from the University of Houston Provost Office, and in 2025, was inducted into the University President’s Circle Awards for her contributions towards research and scholarship.  Professor Trujillo is an elected member of the American Law Institute.

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