Robert Verchick

Rob Verchick is one of the nation's leading scholars in disaster and climate change law and a former EPA official in the Obama administration. He holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Eminent Scholar Chair in Environmental Law and directs Loyola's Center on Environment, Land, and Law. He was a fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study in 2023-2024.

Verchick has written more than 60 articles and four books, including the best-selling The Octopus in the Parking Garage: A Call for Climate Resilience (2023). His work has appeared in many venues, including the California Law Review, Southern California Law Review, and the environmental law reviews at Harvard, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley. 

He has taught as visiting professor at Yale University, Peking University in China, and Aarhus University in Denmark. He has received several teaching awards, including at Loyola, Tulane, and Harvard. 

Verchick comments frequently on radio shows such as NPR's All Things Considered and has written commentary for The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, and other publications.

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 change adaptation policy for the EPA and served on President Obama's Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force.

Verchick — who grew up in the sun-scorched Las Vegas desert and survived Hurricane Katrina as a resident of New Orleans — has spent a career studying environmental resilience across the country. Committed to "place-based" analysis, he has paddled swamps, scaled glaciers, and dived among endangered corals all to understand what is at stake and how we can protect the things we need and love.

Verchick graduated with distinction and honors from Stanford and with honors from Harvard Law School. For more information, including videos of interviews and keynotes, visit his personal website.

Classes Taught:

• Disaster and Law and Policy
• Environmental Justice
• Energy Law and Policy

Areas of Expertise:

• Climate Change
• Disaster Resilience
• Environmental Law and Land Use