Prof. Robert V. Percival

Robert V. Percival is the Robert F. Stanton Professor of Law and the Director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland School of Law.  He received a B.A. summa cum laude from Macalester College, a J.D. from Stanford Law School and an M.A. in economics from Stanford University.  At Stanford Percival was named the Nathan Abbott Scholar for graduating first in his law school class.  Following graduation, he served as a law clerk for Judge Shirley M. Hufstedler of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White.  He joined the Maryland faculty in 1987 after serving as a senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. Percival has served as a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, the China University of Political Science and Law (Beijing), and Comenius University (Bratislava).  He is the principal author of a leading environmental law casebook, now in its 9th edition, and the author of several articles about the Supreme Court and presidential authority over executive agencies.  Percival wrote one of the first articles on the propriety of consent decrees to effectuate and enforce federal law “The Bounds of Consent: Consent Decrees, Settlements and Federal Environmental Policymaking,” 1987 Univ. Chic. Leg. F. 327 (1987).  He also is the author of the first comprehensive analyses of what the papers of the late Justices Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun reveal about the Supreme Court’s handling of environmental cases (“Environmental Law in the Supreme Court: Highlights from the Blackmun Papers,” 35 ELR 10637 (2005), and “Environmental Law in the Supreme Court: Highlights from the Marshall Papers,” 13 ELR 10606 (Oct. 1993)).