Royal C. Gardner

Professor Gardner's areas of teaching and research include environmental and international law. An executive editor of the Boston College Law Review and a member of the Order of the Coif, he graduated magna cum laude from Boston College Law School. He then clerked for Chief Judge Francis J. Boyle of the United States District Court for the District of Rhode Island. From 1989 to 1993, he served in the Army General Counsel's office as the Department of the Army's principal wetland attorney, advising the assistant secretary of the Army (civil works) on legal and policy issues related to the Corps of Engineers' administration of the Clean Water Act section 404 program. From 1993 until he joined the Stetson faculty in 1994, Professor Gardner worked for the Department of Defense, where he participated in negotiating international agreements with Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus to facilitate the dismantlement of the former Soviet Union's nuclear weapons.

In 1999-2001, Professor Gardner was appointed to the National Research Council's Committee on Mitigating Wetland Losses. He was a member of the United States delegations to the Ramsar Convention Conference of the Parties held in Spain (2002) and Uganda (2005), and served as the North American representative to the Ramsar Scientific and Technical Review Panel (2006-08). He is an invited expert to the Ramsar Scientific and Technical Review Panel for 2009-2012. He was the chair of the United States National Ramsar Committee from 2005-08, and is a vice chair of the American Bar Association's Water Quality and Wetlands Committee and its International Environmental Law Committee. In 2006, he won the National Wetlands Award for Education and Outreach.

Professor Gardner has received Stetson University's Homer and Dolly Hand Award for Excellence in Faculty Scholarship and has been voted the Outstanding Professor by the Stetson student body. He has taught at Stetson's summer programs in Spain, Germany, Argentina and Estonia, and has been a visiting professor at the Universidad de Málaga (Spain) and Concordia International University-Estonia, where he received the Outstanding Instructor Award. At Stetson, Professor Gardner has served as director of graduate and international programs, associate dean and vice dean. He was appointed director of Stetson's Institute for Biodiversity Law and Policy in May 2005.