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Steve Roady ’76 brings a wealth of environmental law and policy experience to his new joint appointment at Duke Law School and Duke’s Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions.

As a professor of the practice of law on the Law School’s governing faculty and a faculty fellow at the Nicholas Institute, Roady, who has taught Environmental Litigation and Ocean and Coastal Law and Policy as a senior lecturing fellow at the Law School since 2003, continues to teach. He also is working to create interdisciplinary teams to examine approaches to large-scale environmental problems.

“Providing clean drinking water on a mass scale, limiting nitrogen emissions from agriculture, these types of large-scale environmental issues could be a focus,” said Roady, who has enjoyed a long career as an environmental lawyer at Earthjustice (formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund). “The idea is to identify these problems and then try to bring the brainpower available at the university to bear, tapping into different institutes, initiatives, and schools for relevant expertise.”

“The joint hire of Steve Roady by the Nicholas Institute and Duke Law School, supported by the provost, is a strategic move that builds on the university’s historic strength in environmental law and policy,” said Dean David F. Levi. Roady also works in the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic and will teach in the Law School’s Duke in D.C. program.

“With his national reputation and broad knowledge of environmental law and advocacy, Steve brings new and important opportunities to our environmental law programs, faculty, and students,” Levi said.

Initially focused on ocean-related litigation and policy at Earthjustice, Roady pioneered innovative litigation strategies to preserve ocean resources. He went on to litigate precedent-setting cases that protect water resources and improve the nation’s air quality. More recently, he has been pursuing cases designed to protect coral reefs, and to prevent the mountains and streams of southern West Virginia from being destroyed by mountaintop removal coal mining.

“Very few have the breadth and depth of environmental law and policy experience that Steve Roady possesses,” said Nicholas Institute Director Tim Profeta ’97. “He has not only seen, but been involved in, the creation of many important environmental policies throughout history, and brings an unparalleled knowledge of the debates and the stakeholders to Duke. I look forward to his leadership on efforts at the Nicholas Institute to tackle new and challenging environmental problems.”

From 1998 to 2000, Roady was the director of the Ocean Law Project, an initiative that employed litigation and negotiation to ensure that the U.S. government conserved ocean resources, including fisheries, marine mammals, sea turtles, and Roady ’76 tackles pressing environmental issues with new appointments at Duke Law and Nicholas Institute ocean ecosystems. During 2001 and 2002, he was the first president of Oceana, a nonprofit international ocean conservation organization dedicated to protecting life in the sea through public education, advocacy, communications, science, and litigation.

In 1989 and 1990, Roady served as counsel to United States Senator John H. Chafee on a number of environmental matters in the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, including air quality improvement, coastal barrier island protection, water pollution control, and hazardous waste regulation. While on the Senate staff, Roady was closely involved in drafting the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990. He earlier assisted various companies with their efforts to comply with a wide range of environmental statutes.

Having started his career as the federal environmental statutory and regulatory landscape was in its infancy, Roady says the current terrain is far more complex. “We’ve spent 30 years or so addressing the easily identifiable problems — we have a lot less raw sewage in the rivers,” he said. “Now we’re looking at things in a more nuanced way, and overarching all of this is climate change, which wasn’t really on the radar until very recently. It’s sobering stuff.”