Rob Verchick, JD

Robert R.M. Verchick holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Endowed Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans. He is also a Senior Fellow in Disaster Resilience at Tulane University and President of the Center for Progressive Reform, a national policy institute focused on public health and environmental protection. He is one of the nation’s leading scholars in disaster law and the law of climate change adaptation. He has taught as a visiting professor at Yale University, Peking University, and Aarhus University in Denmark.

In 2009 and 2010, Professor Verchick 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. In the fall of 2012, he researched climate adaptation policies in India as a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, supported by a Fulbright Award.

Professor Verchick’s writing focuses on climate change adaptation, catastrophic hazards, and environmental regulation. He is an author of three books, including the award-winning, Facing Catastrophe: Environmental Action for a Post-Katrina World (Harvard University Press 2010) and Disaster Law and Policy (Aspen Press, 3rd ed. 2015) (with Daniel A. Farber, James Ming Chen, & Lisa Grow Sun). His work has appeared in many venues, including the California Law Review, the Southern California Law Review, and the environmental law reviews at Harvard, Stanford, and Berkeley.

An enthusiastic speaker, Professor Verchick has presented his research at many schools, including Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Oxford, the Panthéon-Sorbonne, Peking University, and the National University of Singapore. Professor Verchick holds an A.B. degree with distinction and honors from Stanford University and a J.D. degree cum laude from Harvard University.