Robert Verchick

Rob Verchick holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans, where he is also Faculty Director of the Center for Environmental Law and Land Use. He recently served in the Obama administration as Deputy Associate Administrator for Policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In that role he helped develop climate adaptation policy for the EPA and served on President Obama's Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.

Verchick’s scholarly writing focuses on environmental regulation, climate change adaptation, and the developing field of disaster law. His work has appeared in many venues, including the California Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the environmental law journals at Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley. His newest book, Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World (Harvard University Press, 2010) was listed as a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of 2010 by the American Library Association.

Verchick has testified before Congress on several issues, including Hurricane Katrina and the economic benefits of environmental regulation. He has also represented environmental interests in friend-of-the-court briefs in cases before the U.S. Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts. He has written commentaries for several news outlets, including the Christian Science Monitor, the Baltimore Sun, and the New Orleans Times-Picayune. And he is a Member Scholar and former board member of the Center for Progressive Reform, a policy institute focused on public health and environmental protection.

Verchick taught for eleven years on the law faculty at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) and practiced environmental law at a Seattle law firm before that. He earned his A.B. degree in English, with distinction and departmental honors, from Stanford University; and his J.D. degree, cum laude, from Harvard Law School, where he served as Articles Editor for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review. Verchick has taught as a visiting professor at Peking University (China), Aarhus University (Denmark), Lewis & Clark College, and Seattle University, and has received teaching awards at Loyola, UMKC, Seattle University, and Harvard College. He has lectured on environmental topics across the United States and Europe, as well as in Israel, South Africa, and China.

Verchick was born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, with parents and grandparents who worked in the local resorts. He is married and has three sons.

Read Professor Verchick's blog posts.