Suma Peesapati

Professor Peesapati is the inaugural Environmental Justice and Community Engagement Officer at the Bay Area Quality Management Air District. Before joining the Air District, she was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2019 to serve as Assistant General Counsel for Enforcement at CalEPA. She has more than two decades of experience practicing law in the private, nonprofit, and public sectors, specializing in environmental law.

Prior to her appointment, Professor Peesapati was a Deputy Attorney General with the California Attorney General’s Bureau of Environmental Justice where she focused on environmental enforcement in low-income communities and communities of color. In 2017, she founded Peesapati Law, a plaintiff’s environmental law firm in San Diego. She has served as a visiting assistant professor at UC Irvine’s Environmental Law Clinic and as adjunct faculty at UC Davis and UC Berkeley Law Schools. Earlier in her career, she practiced law in the Bay Area as a staff attorney with Earthjustice, as an associate attorney with small plaintiffs’ side law firm, and as a staff attorney and an Equal Justice Works Fellow with Communities for a Better Environment.

Professor Peesapati is also an advisor to the Executive Committee of the California Lawyers Association’s Environmental Law Section.

Education

J.D., UC Law, San Francisco (1999)
B.S., UC Berkeley (1996)
B.A., UC Berkeley (1996)

Suma Peesapati is not teaching any Law courses in Fall 2024.

Courses During Other Semesters