Alice Farmer

Alice Farmer is a refugee lawyer studying how climate change alters the international legal framework of forced displacement. Farmer intends to spend the year building proof of concept for a “climate change law lab” that would use interdisciplinary study to equip governments and other stakeholders with the necessary research to form human-rights centered policies in response to climate-change-induced displacement. Additionally, Farmer is working on an edited volume under contract with Edward Elgar titled Climate Change, Migration, Gender, and the Law.

Farmer is on leave from running the United States legal team for the United Nations’ Refugee Agency (UNHCR), and was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre in spring 2024. At UNHCR, she spent seven years litigating for UNHCR, raising international refugee law issues in appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court to defend the right to seek asylum and other core human rights norms. Farmer has worked in field offices of UNHCR, including in Chisinau, Moldova, where she was deployed to help establish the emergency response to the Ukrainian refugee crisis. Previously, Farmer worked as an international human rights lawyer for the ACLU, the Norwegian Refugee Council, and Human Rights Watch, where she led the organization’s campaign to end immigration detention of children. Farmer serves on the board of the Bromley Charitable Trust, an environmental philanthropic foundation.