Nadia Ahmad

Nadia B. Ahmad, JD, LLM is an author, attorney, law professor, and environmental justice advocate. Her research centers on the intersections of energy siting, the environment, and sustainable development drawing on international investment law and corporate social responsibility. Professor Ahmad has spent her academic career focusing on frontline communities who are the most vulnerable to energy production.

She is an Associate Professor at Barry University School of Law. In 2021-2022, she was a Visiting Associate Professor at Yale Law School. She teaches environmental law, property, and business organizations. Professor Ahmad has presented her research on the law and policy of advanced biofuels in Abu Dhabi, Cairo, Cambridge, Doha, Denver, New York, and San Francisco as well as delivered a TEDx talk on "Unearthing Clean Energy."

A pioneer in the field, Professor Ahmad has developed the concept of "climate cages" to highlight how public policy responses to atmospheric dynamics limit mobility, worsen prison conditions, and increase carcerality. She has researched how solutions to the climate crisis have led to the incarceration of Black and Brown people to maximize available land, space, and resources for those who are either more affluent and/or of the more preferred race, religion, and national origin.

A prolific scholar, Professor Ahmad has published over 45 scholarly articles and book chapters that have appeared in leading academic publications, including Oxford University Press, Routledge, Springer, Duke Environmental Law & Policy Forum, Vermont Law Review, Kansas Law Review, University of Miami Law Review, and Virginia Environmental Law Journal. She is a co-author of the textbook, “Environmental Justice: Law, Policy, and Regulation,” (Carolina Academic Press). She serves as affiliated faculty at Harvard Law School's Institute for Global Law and Policy and Rutgers Law School's Center for Security, Race, and Rights.

Prior to joining the Barry Law faculty, Professor Ahmad was the inaugural Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Law at Pace Law School. She also worked as a Legal Fellow with Sustainable Development Strategies Group on tax policy for natural resources, community development agreements, and mineral leasing rights for projects in Afghanistan, Mali, and Mozambique. Before teaching, Professor Ahmad’s early experiences included working for a multinational oil and gas company in the Denver-Julesburg Basin and in a private law practice in Florida focusing on land use, zoning, asset protection, and bad faith insurance litigation defense.

Professor Ahmad earned an undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature with language emphases in Latin and English from the University of California at Berkeley with high honors. Her undergraduate thesis examined representations of tradition and modernity in Indo-Anglian literature from 1947 to 1997. She completed her law degree (J.D.) from the University of Florida Levin College of Law, where she was a Virgil Hawkins Fellowship recipient. At UF Law, she served as executive editor of the Florida Journal of International Law and wrote about women’s property rights in Post-Partition South Asia. Later, she earned a masters of law (LL.M.) in Environmental and Natural Resources Law from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, where she explored the legal barriers for the deployment of advanced renewable technologies in the Global South and worked on the editorial review of the Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law. She is fluent in Urdu, Hindi, and Punjabi, proficient in Arabic, has a reading knowledge of Latin and has studied German, Spanish, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Middle English.