Tseming Yang

Vermont Law School

Professor Tseming Yang is an expert on environmental justice and international environmental law, including the global climate change treaties. He is also recognized for his work in critical race theory and on free trade and the environment.

Professor Yang received his B.A. degree in biochemistry, magna cum laude, from Harvard University in 1988 and his J.D. degree from Boalt Hall School of Law of the University of California, Berkeley, in 1992, where he served as articles editor of the California Law Review. Upon graduation from law school, he clerked for the Honorable Rudi M. Brewster of the United States District Court for the Southern District of California. He then practiced law with the firm of Latham & Watkins, San Francisco, before serving as an attorney with the United States Department of Justice in 1994. As an attorney in the Policy, Legislation, and Special Litigation Section of the Environment and Natural Resources Division, Professor Yang’s responsibilities included domestic and international environmental policy work as well as federal Indian policy. From 1995 to 1996, he served as a director of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association of Washington, DC. He joined the VLS faculty in 1998. From 1999 to 2003, Professor Yang served as a member of the executive committee and the international subcommittee of EPA’s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council; he was appointed chair of the international subcommittee in 2002. In 2004, he was awarded a three-year grant from the Lingnan Foundation to sponsor collaborative research projects with students from Vermont Law School and Sun Yat-sen University School of Law in Guangzhou, China. Professor Yang was a visiting faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh Law School during the fall of 2004. In 2005, he was a Fulbright Senior Scholar, lecturing and doing comparative environmental law research at the Tsinghua University School of Law in Beijing, China. His article on the NAFTA Environmental Side Agreement was chosen by other environmental law professors as one of the best environmental law articles of 2005.  Professor Yang currently serves as the director of the Vermont Law School/Sun Yat-sen University Partnership for Environmental Law in China, a USAID-sponsored collaborative program to advance environmental and energy law and policy in China.