Thomas W. Merrill, a legal scholar, is the Charles Evans Hughes professor at Columbia Law School. He has also taught at Yale Law School and Northwestern University School of Law. He is a leader in three fields: property, administrative, and environmental law. He received a B.A. from Grinnell College in 1971 and a B.A. with first-class honors in philosophy, politics and economics in 1973 from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He received his JD from the University of Chicago Law School in 1977 and went on to clerk for Judge David L. Bazelon of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and then United States Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun. Before moving to Yale, he was the Charles Keller Beekman Professor of Law at Columbia from 2003 to 2008 and the John Paul Stevens Profes