Cliff Villa

Cliff Villa currently advises the U.S. EPA Office of Land and Emergency Management, helping to carry out priorities of the Biden Administration including environmental justice and climate change.  At EPA, Cliff helps ensure that new federal funding for recycling and cleanup of contaminated sites reaches communities that have been historically underserved.  Before joining the Administration in August 2022, Cliff served as a tenured professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law, where he teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional rights, environmental law, and environmental justice.  Before joining the UNM law faculty in 2015, Cliff spent more than 20 years as an EPA attorney in Washington, D.C.; Denver, Colorado; and Seattle, Washington.  Among other publications, Cliff is the lead author of Environmental Justice:  Law, Policy & Regulation (3^rd ed. 2020), and author of continuing legal scholarship on environmental justice including Remaking Environmental Justice, 66 Loyola L. Rev. 469 (2020); and Environmental Justice in Modern Legal Practice, 30 N.Y.U. Envtl. L.J. 157 (2022).  Cliff was born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with local roots tracing back over three hundred years.