Zsea Bowmani is a legal scholar and civil rights attorney working at the intersections of environment, race, gender, sexual orientation, human rights, and the law. He teaches environmental law and policy at Santa Clara University School of Law and the College of Arts & Sciences, where he leads multidisciplinary teams to conduct legal research and provide advocacy support for Bay Area grassroots organizations as head of the Environmental Justice Advocacy Lab. Zsea is also co-lead of the Law & Advocacy Project of SCU’s Environmental Justice Initiative, which fosters community-engaged research and advocacy for social justice.

A scholar-activist, Zsea has written broadly on the law’s role in discrimination and environmental degradation, as well as its potential to effect change. His research has appeared in many publications, including the Georgetown Journal of Gender and the Law, the Tulane Journal of Law and Sexuality, the Seattle Journal for Social Justice, Thomson Reuters West, and a forthcoming book chapter with the University of California Press – Luminos. His current research investigates how Black queer feminist ecology can shape better, more equitable environmental laws and policies and climate change responses. Zsea’s work is also international and includes in-country research on the impact of market liberalization on Cuba’s sustainable development and growing socioeconomic stratification, which was supported by a Hackworth Research Grant from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. In addition to his scholarship, Zsea is also active within the local environmental justice movement through the National Lawyers Guild San Francisco Bay Area Chapter’s Environmental Justice Committee, which he established in 2021, and as a board member of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice.

After graduating from Santa Clara Law, Zsea worked at the ACLU of Illinois and the National LGBTQ Task Force in Washington, DC, where he worked on US Supreme Court and appellate cases and developed policies to defend the rights of LGBTQ people in employment, schools, criminal law, and health care settings. Prior to that, Zsea worked for UNESCO in Cambodia to protect cultural heritage in times of war, and the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative in London on decriminalizing homosexuality in former British colonies.

A native of Los Angeles, Zsea received his B.A. from Stanford University and his J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law with certificates in Public International Law (with honors) and Public Interest and Social Justice Law.