Rachel E. Deming

Professor and Clinic Director, University of Michigan Law School

Professor Rachel E. Deming has worked on environmental compliance and corporate sustainable development issues for over twenty years. More recently, she has worked in the field of impact investment with a focus on transactions at the base of the global economic pyramid.

Rachel is currently Co-Director of the International Transactions Clinic, clinical assistant professor, and a professor from practice at the University of Michigan Law School. She also developed and taught a course on environmental dispute resolution at Pace University School of Law.

As Co-director for the International Transactions Clinic, Rachel supervises students working for organizations whose missions are to alleviate global poverty, to provide education, housing and services in the developing world, to decrease environmental degradation and to find solutions to climate change. This is the first and, so far, only law school clinic to give students transactional experience in cross-border matters for real clients. Clients include student start-up ventures who have invented medical devices for use in Ghana, rural India and Uganda; impact investors financing agribusiness entrepreneurs and local businesses providing communications and other services throughout the world, including Madagascar, Indonesia and Peru; and projects for development finance institutions seeking to invest at the base of the pyramid.

Rachel began her legal career at the New York law firm Shearman & Sterling working on international banking and mergers and acquisitions litigation. She then worked for Ciba Corporation, a Swiss-based global manufacturing company, as in-house counsel primarily on environmental issues, a position which included advocacy on environmental concerns and corporate sustainable development.

In recognition of her expertise in environmental and financial issues, Rachel was appointed by the Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to its Environmental Financial Advisory Board in 2005 and served on the Board until March, 2011. She was also involved in the establishment of an environmental dispute resolution center at Pace Law School, the Kheel Center for the Resolution of Environmental Interest Disputes, and received the Founder’s Award for her work in 2009.

Professor Deming received her A.B. in Russian Studies and history, cum laude with honors, in 1977, and her J.D. in 1982 from the University of Michigan. She is the proud mother of two daughters who also graduated from Michigan.