Robert Percival is the Robert F. Stanton Professor of Law and director of the Environmental Law Program at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law. He received a BA, summa cum laude, from Macalester College, a JD from Stanford Law School, and an MA in economics from Stanford University. At Stanford, Percival was named the Nathan Abbott Scholar for graduating first in his law school class.

After graduation, he served as a law clerk for Judge Shirley M. Hufstedler of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron R. White. He joined the Maryland Carey Law faculty in 1987 after serving as a senior attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund. Percival has served as a visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, the China University of Political Science and Law (Beijing), and Comenius University (Bratislava).

He is the principal author of a leading environmental law casebook, now in press for its ninth edition, and the author of several articles about the Supreme Court and presidential authority over executive agencies. These include the first comprehensive analyses of what the papers of the late Justices Thurgood Marshall and Harry Blackmun reveal about the Supreme Court's handling of environmental cases - "Environmental Law in the Supreme Court: Highlights from the Blackmun Papers" and "Environmental Law in the Supreme Court: Highlights from the Marshall Papers."