Campaign Priorities: Improving Law and Society

The campaign's goals include $20 million for professorships, program support, and faculty development. The School of Law is home to several nationally ranked specialty programs. Providing opportunities for in-depth scholarship and teaching, these programs are a magnet for leading faculty and students from across the country, and provide a platform for substantive efforts to shape law and policy.

Profile: Environmental Law Program

For more than two decades, the School of Law's nationally ranked Environmental Law Program has helped protect the health of our region's air, land and water. In 2007, those efforts continued, even as the program expanded its global reach by hosting a symposium that assembled environmental and public health clinicians and top public interest lawyers from around the world. The result was the creation of an international network of clinical law programs that will collaborate to expand and uphold environmental regulations around the globe.

"It's clear that what happens in China or India can have a significant impact on environmental issues in the United States," says program director Robert Percival. "It's essential to work at all levels of government, and Maryland is seizing the opportunity to lead a growing community of environmental law professors that are collaborating to shape law and policy in nations around the world."

At home in Maryland, the law school's Environmental Clinic represented the Natural Resources Defense Council in a federal lawsuit that forced the Environmental Protection Agency to consider the harmful effects of atrazine, the most commonly used herbicide in the country, on endangered aquatic species in the Chesapeake Bay. Clinic students also issued a report, Enforcement in Maryland's Critical Area: Perception and Practice, that determined enforcement of Maryland's most important Bay protection legislation was lagging. Based in large part on that report, Maryland's Attorney General has made environmental enforcement one of his top priorities.

"Our location provides great opportunities to make an impact. Students work on environmental policy issues at the local, state and national levels," says Professor Percival.