David A. Wirth

Professor Wirth has taught and written in the areas of Public International Law, Foreign Relations Law of the United States, International Environmental Law, European Union Law, International Human Rights, International Organizations, Administrative Law, and Clinical Legal Education. He has had more than two decades of experience teaching, researching and working in his specialty of international environmental law.

In 2001 Professor Wirth served as a legal expert on the delegation of Belgium to the Sixth Session, Part Two, of the Conference of the Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. On behalf of the 15-member European Union, Professor Wirth served as a principal negotiator of the critical compliance section of the Bonn Agreement, which rescued the Kyoto Protocol from collapse after the United States announced its intention not to ratify. In 1997 Professor Wirth served as consultant to the United Nations Development Program, for which he drafted its public information and document disclosure policy. He has prepared studies for the United Nations Environment Program and the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation. Professor Wirth has served as a consultant to the C.S. Mott Foundation, for which he evaluated the environmental policies of the World Bank and the regional development banks. He has also served on the selection committee for, and as a consultant to, the German Marshall Fund of the United States' Environmental Fellowship Program, which supports transatlantic exchanges of environmental specialists.

Professor Wirth began his legal career in the Office of the Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., where he had principal responsibility for all international environmental issues, including exports of hazardous substances and technologies, acid rain, and stratospheric ozone depletion. Subsequently, Professor Wirth served as Senior Attorney and Co-Director of the International Program at the Washington, D.C. office of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a nonprofit public interest law firm specializing in environmental issues. While there, he worked on a variety of international environmental issues, including environmental reform of the World Bank and regional development banks, the "greenhouse" effect, Soviet and eastern European environmental issues, stratospheric ozone depletion, and exports of hazardous substances. In his positions at the Department of State and NRDC, Professor Wirth has had extensive experience in multilateral negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations Environment Program, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the UN Economic Commission for Europe, and other international organizations. In the late 1990s Professor Wirth returned to full-time public interest work, directing a policy dialogue on trade and the environment sponsored by the Community Nutrition Institute. He continues to work actively in the government and public interest sectors, most recently serving as acting chair of a federal advisory committee, which advises the Environmental Protection Agency on international policy among the NAFTA countries.

Professor Wirth is the author of more than 50 articles and reports on international environmental law and policy for legal, academic, and popular audiences. He is currently working with a group of other authors on new editions of two of the leading legal textbooks, one on environmental law and the other on international organizations. His publications have appeared in the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the Virginia Law Review, Foreign Policy, and the American Journal of International Law.

Professor Wirth has been an active participant in shaping many of the major international environmental policy developments over the past two decades. He has played a leading role as a public policy advocate on the issues of global warming, trade and the environment, stratospheric ozone depletion, and the environmental performance of the multilateral banks, among others. He has delivered testimony on international environmental issues on 18 occasions before nine different congressional committees. Professor Wirth holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in chemistry, has worked as an analytical chemist in industry, and was a recipient of a prestigious National Science Foundation Fellowship. He speaks Russian and holds a certificate in language and culture from what was then Leningrad State University. He has been the recipient of many prominent fellowships and awards, including appointments as a Fulbright Fellow; a Resident Scholar at the Rockefeller FoundationStudy Center in Bellagio, Italy; a Pew Faculty Fellow in International Affairs at Harvard University; and a Resident Fellow at the Center for Studies and Research at the Hague Academy of International Law. In recognition of his professional stature, Professor Wirth in 1998 was appointed a life member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

David Wirth
Boston College Law School
Newton, MA
617.552.1237
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