Photo: dreid1987 via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).
Gabriela Nagle Alverio, who earned her law degree at Duke University School of Law in 2025 and completed a PhD at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment this spring, has won the Nicholas School's 2026 Dean's Award for Outstanding Graduate Student Manuscript. The paper, "Protecting Climate Migrants," has been accepted for publication in The Environmental Law Reporter. Duke Law noted the honor in its June 2026 class notes. Our congratulations to her.
Her paper takes on a genuinely unsettled question in the law: how, and whether, existing legal frameworks protect people forced to move by climate change. Those displaced by drought, flooding, and rising seas often fall between the cracks of refugee, immigration, and environmental law, none of which was built for them, and the paper was recognised, in the award's terms, for its rigorous analysis of that gap.
An interdisciplinary path
Nagle Alverio is the kind of scholar these questions increasingly demand: she holds both a Duke law degree and a Duke doctorate in environmental policy, and her research sits at the intersection of climate change and human security, the legal and policy protections owed to people displaced by climate disasters. A manuscript award of this kind, given for work already accepted by a peer-reviewed law journal, marks her as a serious voice on a problem that is only going to grow.
Why it matters
Climate migration is moving from the margins of legal scholarship toward its centre, as courts, legislatures, and international bodies confront displacement that existing categories do not cleanly cover. Scholarship that maps the gap, and proposes ways to fill it, is exactly the groundwork that later shapes doctrine and policy. That a new graduate is doing that work, and being recognised for it, is worth marking.
For Duke law students
Duke Law students and alumni have complimentary access to LegalAlphabet, where they can search legal jobs and internships worldwide, including environmental and public-interest roles. Visit the Duke Law campus page, browse current openings on the United States legal jobs board, or read more from our Law School News desk.
Sources
This report is based on the class notes published by Duke University School of Law.
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