Shalanda Baker
Professor, Center for Law, Innovation and Creativity, Northeastern University | Faculty Affiliate, Global Resilience Institute
Boston, MA, UNITED STATES
Professor Shalanda H. Baker is a professor of law, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University.
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Biography
Professor Shalanda H. Baker is a professor of law, public policy, and urban affairs at Northeastern University. Professor Baker is an affiliate faculty member in Northeastern’s Global Resilience Institute, and she teaches courses at the law school and in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities. Baker was awarded a 2016-17 Fulbright-García Robles grant, which she utilized to explore Mexico’s energy reform, climate change and indigenous rights. Before joining Northeastern’s faculty, Professor Baker spent three years as an associate professor of law at the William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai’i, where she was the founding director of the Energy Justice Program. Prior to that, she served on the faculty at University of San Francisco School of Law. Baker holds a Bachelor of Science degree in political science from the United States Air Force Academy, a Juris Doctor from Northeastern University School of Law, and an LLM from the University of Wisconsin School of Law, where she also served as a William H. Hastie Fellow.
Areas of Expertise (4)
Sustainable Development
Environmental Law
Governance and Incentives
Renewable Energy Law
Education (3)
University of Wisconsin Law School: LLM 2012
Northeastern University School of Law: JD 2005
United States Air Force Academy: BS 1998
Links (7)
Media Appearances (5)
Professor Finds Passion in Energy Justice Law
News @ Northeastern online
2017-11-08
In 2009, Shalanda Baker left her job as a project finance lawyer at a big global law firm and booked a one-way ticket to Latin America.
10 Ways Women Can Beat Back Misogyny In The Tech World: Part 3
CleanTechnica online
2017-09-24
Women in tech have faced discrimination that limits experimentation, inhibits a company’s professional growth, and halts technological progress across disciplines. In this final part of our three-part series, we examine how when women rise up in the tech world with particular focuses on leadership and accountability, tech companies make inroads toward bridging gender and diversity gaps. Why? What’s good for business success becomes a top-down commitment to gender inclusiveness. Accountability measures follow as a means to an end that drives change and fosters real results toward egalitarianism.
Energy Justice: Addressing Social, Racial, and Economic Concerns within the Cleantech Conversation
CleanTechnica online
2017-07-24
Our new series here on CleanTechnica seeks to highlight women working in the broad field of cleantech and sustainability to add diversity to the cleantech conversation.
UH Law School admitted to well-regarded environmental law academy
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa online
2015-04-09
The William S. Richardson School of Law has been admitted to the prestigious International Union for Conservation of Nature Academy of Environmental Law. It represents 180 law faculties and research centers in over 50 nations.
Law School announces new faculty, director of Environmental Law Program
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa online
2014-10-20
Two exceptional new faculty members -- Associate Professor Shalanda H. Baker and Professor Daniel L. Barnett -- have joined the Law School on the UH Mānoa campus this summer, providing expanded offerings in the School’s award-winning Environmental Law program, as well as advanced courses in legal writing and problem solving.
Articles (4)
Is Fracking The Next Financial Crisis?: A Development Lens For Understanding Systematic Risk And Governance
Temple Law Review
Shalanda Helen Baker
2015 Natural gas sits in deposits across vast regions of the United States, and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) is the current method used to extract it. Fracking for natural gas has been billed as the next economic boon to poor communities and the key to mitigating the negative effects of climate change. But fracking also involves risks: risks to our environment, to our communities, and to our markets. To date, the debate about fracking—and efforts to address concerns about the risks of fracking—has largely been a debate about who should regulate, the federal government, the states, or some combination of the two. Framing the current fracking debate as a federalism question is a mistake.
Why the IFC’s Free, Prior, and Informed Consent Policy Doesn’t Matter (Yet) to Indigenous Communities Affected by Development Projects
Wisconsin International Law Journal
Shalanda H Baker
2013 In May 2011, the International Finance Corporation (“IFC”), the commercial lending arm of the World Bank, revised its Policy and Performance Standards on Social and Environmental Sustainability. The revised standards require that projects financed by the IFC obtain the free, prior, and informed consent (“FPIC”) of indigenous peoples affected by such projects. This marks a watershed moment in international development history. After decades of wrangling and negotiations among nongovernmental organizations, host countries, private industry, and development banks, there now appears to be a growing consensus that when a development project affects indigenous peoples, the project must obtain the FPIC of such affected indigenous peoples.
Unmasking Project Finance: Risk Mitigation, Risk Inducement, and an Invitation to Development Disaster?
Texas Journal of Oil, Gas, and Energy Law
Shalanda Helen Baker
2011 Each year one in every five foreign direct investment dollars in the Global South flows through project finance transactions. These transactions consist of large-scale energy and infrastructure projects, and consistently produce deleterious effects on third parties. Until now, much of the legal scholarship in the infrastructure development field has focused its attention on the complex mechanics of project finance, including understanding the ways in which project promoters utilize project finance to manage commercial and political risks. Much of the human rights and environmental advocacy related to negative development outcomes is limited to seeking ex post fact relief. To date, very few scholars have delved into the intersection between these bodies of scholarship (project finance and human rights), and queried whether project finance transactions, ex ante, have a relationship to the externalities produced in large-scale development projects.
Telling: Living with Don't Ask, Don't Tell
Journal of Legal Education
Shalanda Helen Baker
2007