Aldana, Raquel Estela

Professor Aldana is the Director of the Pacific McGeorge Inter-American Program, a pedagogically innovative program committed to educating bilingual and bicultural lawyers who wish to pursue a transnational career with a focus on U.S-Latin America relations. The inaugural Inter-American Program was held in Guatemala in the Summer of 2009 during which McGeorge law students received intensive comparative legal instruction in Spanish and a course on legal Spanish and then traveled for 10 weeks in Guatemala to enroll in law courses at the University of Landivar and to complete externships with Guatemalan legal institutions focused on trade, environmental justice, human rights, immigration, and labor law. A Fulbright scholar, Professor Aldana has taught several courses in the human rights L.L.M. program at Landivar in Guatemala and conducted research on femicide. She also has taught an experiential, comparative law course titled Domestic Violence in a Post-Conflict Society while conducting field research in Nicaragua about the implementation of mediation to resolve domestic violence issues. As well, as an immigration scholar, professor Aldana emphasizes through her teaching and scholarship the transnational factors that drive migration and should influence immigration policies. Her transnational scholarship has been focused on rule of law reforms implemented in Latin America and on victim's rights. She also teaches in the areas of US criminal law and procedure, and Latin America Comparative Law. Prior to teaching, she was a human rights lawyer for the Center for Justice and International Law where she litigated human rights cases involving Latin American nations and the Caribbean before the Inter-American System on Human Rights.