Luz Estella Nagle

Professor Nagle has participated in rule of law, judicial reform, anti-corruption/transborder crime, and hemispheric security projects sponsored by the U.S. Departments of Defense, Justice, State, USAID, and ABA ROLI throughout Latin America. Her past assignments include training Argentine judges and Colombian criminal law professors in accusatory criminal justice reform with the Department of Justice, addressing the deployment of land mines by illegal armed groups in Andean states with the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies Office, and working with the Staff Judge Advocate’s Office of the U.S. Southern Command in training Colombian military commanders and staff judge advocates at the brigade and division levels in the application of international humanitarian law and coordinating humanitarian operations in conflict zones. She has engaged government officials, military commanders, journalists, and human rights advocates from more than eighty countries as a legal expert with the State Department’s Distinguished Foreign Visitor’s Program, and she has been a State Department consultant and area expert in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela. In 2022 and 2023, Professor Nagle conducted training and outreach to government and non-government stakeholders on anti-human trafficking and anti-corruption efforts sponsored by the ABA Rule of Law Initiative programs in Cartagena and Bogotá, Colombia and Lima, Peru.

Professor Nagle has dedicated more than two decades of distinguished service to the International Bar Association, currently serving as a Trustee of the IBA’s Human Rights Institute Trust, and as a member of the Human Rights Law Committee. She has served on the IBA Legal Practice Division Council, the Human Rights Institute Council, and was the Latin American Regional Forum Liaison Officer of the Access to Justice and Legal Aid. She is a past Co-Chair of the Criminal Law Section’s Sub-Committee on Violence against Women, and former Co-Chair, Vice Chair, and Secretary of the IBA Criminal Law Section. Her special assignments include having served on task forces on terrorism, corruption, criminal justice reform, and as Vice Chair of the IBA President’s Task Force against Human Trafficking, co-authoring the Task Force’s 2016 Report on Human Trafficking and Public Corruption.

Professor Nagle’s key activities in the American Bar Association include her current appointment as Chair, ABA ROLI Latin America and Caribbean, and membership on the ABA ROLI Council. She served on the ABA’s Criminal Justice Council and was Co-Chair of the International Criminal Law Committee. She has worked on several ABA special projects, including the Task Force on the Vienna Convention on Consular Affairs, the Task Force on International Child Abduction, the Special Task Force on the ICC, and the Corruption and the Rule of Law Working Group. Professor Nagle is an elected member of the American Law Institute, the American Society of International Law (ASIL), the International Association of Prosecutors (IAP), and has affiliated with several other international learned legal societies.

A prolific scholar addressing many topics of international law, international criminal law, judicial reform, regional security, and human rights, Professor Nagle’s scholarship has appeared in four languages on five continents. A highly regarded international voice in the fight against human trafficking and corruption, Professor Nagle has served as an advisor to UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons to assess the impact of armed conflict on making people vulnerable to human trafficking, and she is the author of the 2017 book, Understanding Human Trafficking, Corruption, and the Optics of Misconduct in the Public, Private, and NGO Sectors: Causes, Actors, and Solutions (Carolina Academic Press), and co-author of the 2018 book, Negociación en Casos de Corrupción: Fundamentos Teóricos y Prácticos (Tirant lo blanch, Spain).

Professor Nagle holds an LL.D. from the Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Colombia) with specializations in criminal law and sports law, a J.D. from the College of William & Mary in Virginia, an LL.M. in international law from UCLA School of Law, an M.A. in Latin American studies (law, political science, history) from the University of California at Los Angeles, and two certifications in national security law from the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia School of Law.