Inter-American Program Faculty

Raquel Aldana, program director

Professor Aldana is the founder and director of the Pacific McGeorge Inter-American program. She has written extensively on immigration in the U.S. with a special focus on Latinos and also on rule of law reforms and human rights issues in the Americas. Prior to this program, she taught experiential learning courses in Nicaragua and as a Fulbright scholar and visiting professor in the human rights LL.M. at the University of Rafael Landivar in Guatemala. Before joining academia, she was a human rights lawyer with the Center for Justice and International Law where she litigated cases before the Inter-American Commission and Court on Human Rights. As part of this program, she teaches Comparative Latin American law, Derecho Comparado Latino Americano: El Caso de Guatemala; International Labor Law and Immigration. She also coaches the Inter-American moot court team.

Luis Mogollón, program consultant

Luis Mogollón is a consultant with the Inter-American Program. As a Guatemalan lawyer with deep roots in the country, Luis has helped the program forge meaningful connections with many of our partners in Latin America and in the U.S. In Guatemala, Luis worked for the Department of Labor as Secretary General and as a labor inspector, and he was responsible for conducting worksite investigation and representing indigent workers in their complaints against employers for violations to Guatemala's labor code.

Kathleen Benton, faculty

Professor Benton is an attorney with over twenty-three years experience in the area of criminal law. Ms. Benton is the director and staff attorney of the Victims of Crime Resource Center. She is also the Director of the Victim Rights Clinic. Her involvement with the Inter-American program includes being an integral part of the Citizenship Fair.

Mara Lorena Bocaletti, faculty

Professor Mara Lorena Bocaletti teaches undergraduate and graduate level environmental law courses at the Universidad-Rafael Landívar, the Universidad del Valle, and the Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala. She has served as a consultant on environmental and human rights matters to a variety of civil society and United Nations organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund, the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation, the United Nations Development Program, CARE Guatemala, and the SOROS Foundation of Guatemala. Professor Bocaletti received her law degree from the Universidad Rafael Landívar in Guatemala and a Masters in Environmental Policy and Management from the Universidad Carlos III in Madrid, Spain.

Raymond Coletta, faculty

Professor Coletta is the author of casebooks and texts in the fields of property law and wills and trusts law. His scholarship offers a unique perspective because of his interest in biology and evolution. He was a founding member of the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law and served as a Research Fellow with the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research. Professor Coletta has spend portions of the past 30 years in Brazil, traveling extensively throughout the country and frequently interacting with attorneys and judges regarding Brazilian Law.

Hector De Avila, faculty

Professor Avila is an attorney (Mexican Jurisdiction) at De Avila Law Firm, a Sacramento-based firm focusing in International, and Mexican law. He was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and attended the Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes, where he earned his LL.B. degree. He then obtained his LL.M. degree in Transnational Business Practice from Pacific McGeorge. Hector is fluent in Spanish and English, and is a Foreign Legal Consultant for the Law of Mexico before the State Bar of California. Hector was an on line faculty member of the University of Phoenix where he taught International Law and International Commercial Law in the Spanish MBA Program. He also teaches Legal Spanish in the Pacific McGeorge Inter-American Program.

Marjorie Florestal, faculty

Professor Florestal has done extensive work on sustainable development in Africa and Haiti. As a legal consultant for the African Development Bank or through her employment with the U.S. Department of Commerce, her depth of knowledge about trade and development in developing nations forms the basis of her interest in Latin America. Professor Florestal participated in the Guatemala Summer Program in 2010 where she taught Trade and Development Law: A Latin Perspective. She is currently working on a law review article about that experience.

Fred Galves, faculty

Professor Galves is one of the nation's leading scholars on matters pertaining to the use of technology in the classroom, in the courts, and by the legal profession. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he is a recognized scholar in the fields of banking, evidence and technology. While in law school, professor Galves spent time in Chile during the Pinochet regime and returned to Chile as a law professor to train prosecutors and public defenders on the U.S. adversarial system. In Summer 2012, Prof. Galves will teach Comparative Litigation in the Americas in the Inter-American Guatemala summer program.

Carmen G. González, faculty

Professor González holds a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. She teaches at Seattle University School of Law, where her research focuses on the environmental justice implications of economic globalization. Her recent scholarship examines the impact of the global trade regime on climate change, food security, and agrobiodiversity; the developmental and environmental implications of China's growing economic influence in Latin America; and the impact of Mexico's neoliberal economic reforms on indigenous peoples. Professor Gonzalez was a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, a Visiting Professor at the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China, and a Fellow at the U.S. Supreme Court. She is part of a consortium of law professors that was awarded a three year grant from Higher Education for Development/U.S. Agency for International Development to conduct environmental law capacity-building workshops for law professors in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.

Leslie Gielow Jacobs, faculty

Professor Gielow Jacobs holds a B.A. from Wesleyan University and got her J.D. magna cum laude from the University of Michigan. A former U.S. Supreme Court law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., she has authored a substantial and important body of scholarship on constitutional law, specifically free speech and government speech, and on topics including access to information and anti-corruption reforms in developing countries.  She is co-author of Global Issues in Constitutional Law and Global Issues in Freedom of Speech and Religion.  She has taught law in Austria, England and China, and spent sabbatical time studying language, history and culture in Guatemala. Additionally, she is the Director of the Pacific McGeorge Capital Center for Public Law & Policy, dedicated to studying issues of federalism and government structure and aiding government policymakers who must navigate their complexities. Jacobs taught Comparative Free Speech and Access to Information in the Americas in the 2011 Inter-American Guatemala Summer Program.

Roberto Juárez, Jr., faculty

A graduate of Stanford University and of the University of Texas School of Law, Professor José Roberto (Beto) Juárez, Jr. teaches at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where he also serves as Director of the Lawyering in Spanish Program. His research interests include employment discrimination, language rights, legal history, race, and law and religion. He teaches courses in civil procedure, civil rights, conflict of laws, constitutional law, federal courts, professional responsibility, and remedies, and offers a seminar on language rights. Fluent in English and Spanish, he regularly teaches courses on the law of the United States at law schools in Mexico, and he teaches in the Inter-American Summer Program in Guatemala. He served as dean at the College of Law from 2006 to 2009. Professor Juárez is chair of the board of directors of the Journal of Law & Religion. He was co-President of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT), the largest membership organization of law professors in the nation from 2004-2006. He was named one of the Top 100 Influential Hispanics by Hispanic Business Magazine in 2006, and was inducted into Stanford University's Multicultural Alumni Hall of Fame in 2007.

Dorothy Landsberg, faculty

Professor Landsberg is the Director of the Legal Clinics. She brings 20 years experience as an associate and a partner with one of Sacramento's largest law firms to her work. A specialist in education and employment law, she has litigated cases before administrative law judges, trial courts and the California Courts of Appeal. She has also conducted independent investigations of employment practices and participated in collective bargaining. Professor Landsberg understands the importance of bi-lingual and inter-cultural lawyers to represent latinos in the U.S. She is an integral part of the program's service learning opportunities and has instituted inter-cultural training in all clinical programs.

Larry Levine, faculty

Professor Levine has authored several books and articles on the subject of Torts, and is a frequent panelist, lecturer, and speaker on legal issues involving sexual orientation. He has served on numerous national boards regarding the legal rights of the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. In 2010 he gave a Spanish lecture on marriage equality in Buenos Aries. He was a Latin American Political major and studied in Cholula, Puebla, Mexico. He is also an extensive traveler and has been around much of South America.

Stephen McCaffrey, faculty

Professor McCaffrey is a Distinguished Professor and Scholar. One of the world’s foremost authorities on international water law, he served as special rapporteur for the commission’s draft articles on the law of the non-navigational uses of international watercourses, which formed the basis of the 1997 U.N. Convention on the subject. Professor McCaffrey was Counselor on International Law in the State Department in 1984-85 and represents countries in disputes before the International Court of Justice and other fora. Professor McCaffrey represented Nicaragua in the Navigational and Related Rights case (Costa Rica v. Nicaragua) and Uruguay in the Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay case (Argentina v. Uruguay), both cases involving river water disputes. Since 1995, he has also been Special Legal Advisor (SLA) to the Commission for Environmental Cooperation under the NAAEC, NAFTA's environmental side agreement.

Blake Nordahl, faculty

Professor Blake Nordahl is a successful practitioner with a burgeoning law practice that aids foreigners seeking to become U.S. citizens. A former attorney advisor with the Executive Office for Immigration Review (Immigration Court) in San Diego, he oversees the Pacific McGeorge Immigration Law Clinic, which has grown exponentially in recent years. Professor Nordahl was a key organizer in the inaugural Pacific McGeorge Citizenship Fair held in November 2009, which helped hundreds of future citizens.

Enrique Sánchez Usera, faculty

Professor Sánchez is the Director of Private Law at the Faculty of Juridical and Social Sciences of Universidad Rafael Landivar in Guatemala City. His primary areas of specialization are Banking Law, Construction Law and Business Associations. He is also a Professor of Law at Universidad del Istmo and an associate with the law firm Rivers y Asociados in Guatemala. Professor Sánchez received his law degree from the Universidad de Deusto in his native Spain and a Masters in Economic and Mercantile Law from Universidad Rafael Landivar. He is a member of the Spanish Chamber of Commerce of Guatemala and is currently writing a series of text books that will cover the entire area of mercantile law. Professor Sánchez teaches Derecho Comercial para Inversionistas Extranjeros as part of the Inter-American program in Guatemala.

Greg Weber, faculty

Professor Gregory Weber is an expert on water resources law, California civil discovery law, and collaborative policy-making processes. He is the Director of the Pacific McGeorge graduate program in water resources law. His scholarly works include co-authorship of one of the leading water resources law casebooks. In addition to his teaching and scholarship he helps mediate water resources disputes and facilitate collaborative policy processes. He also teaches negotiation and mediation to practicing attorneys through Pacific McGeorge's Executive Education program. He speaks Spanish and has traveled extensively throughout Mexico and will offer a course on Introduction to US Legal System with a Focus on Environmental Matters in partnership with the CAFTA's Secreatariat on Environmental Issues in Guatemala City.