Jeffrey Thaler
Visiting Professor, University of Maine
B.A., magna cum laude, Williams College
J.D., Yale Law School
Office Phone: (207) 228-8539
jeffrey.thaler@maine.edu
Jeff Thaler is the University of Maine and Maine Law School’s first Visiting Professor of Energy Policy, Law & Ethics, and Assistant University Counsel for environmental, energy and sustainability projects. He has been developing and teaching courses on Renewable Energy Law, Energy Economics and Law, Administrative Law, and Climate Change Law and Policy.
Professor Thaler graduated magna cum laude from Williams College and from Yale Law School. He clerked for Chief Justice Vincent McKusick and Senior Associate Justice Sidney Wernick of the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
Before joining the University, Professor Thaler developed over several decades a wide-ranging legal practice focusing upon environmental and energy permitting, compliance, enforcement and litigation; as well as litigation for clients with commercial, medical and legal disputes, and insurance coverage, personal injury and toxic tort problems.
For many years Professor Thaler has been recognized by Best Lawyers in America for his work in environmental and natural resources law, commercial litigation and appellate law, by Chambers USA for both his environmental and litigation practices, and by New England Super Lawyers for his environmental work. In 2010, he was elected the 3rd President of the American College of Environmental Lawyers, a prestigious organization for which he also is a founder and charter member. Professor Thaler is the 2007 recipient of the Justice Louis Scolnik Award for his many years of pro bono civil liberties litigation work. He also represented a family, pro bono, who had lost their father in the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
Professor Thaler has been permitting counsel for on-and off-shore wind projects and hydro power and wood-to-biofuel facilities, as well as many other commercial development projects; he continues as the attorney for UMaine's DeepCwind floating deepwater wind projects. Professor Thaler is the author of Fiddling as the World Burns: How Climate Change Urgently Requires a Paradigm Shift in the Permitting of Renewable Energy Projects, 42 Lewis & Clark Environmental Law Review 1101-1156 (December 2012) , and the lead author of The Maine Environmental Handbook and the recent Lexis Nexis Treatise Treatment of Greenhouse Gases Under the National Environmental Policy Act. He also is a founder and been Co-Chair of the Environmental and Energy Technology Council of Maine, the state's leading organization for that growing sector of Maine's economy.
In his litigation practice, Professor Thaler was trial counsel in a federal accounting case in which the jury awarded his client over $6.6 million, one of the largest such verdicts in Maine. He also has been lead trial counsel in a number of other cases resulting in seven-figure settlements, and has successfully defended many attorneys, law firms and business in state and federal courts, and served for over a decade, including as Chair, of the Maine Supreme Court's Advisory Committee on the Code of Professional Responsibility.
In 2006-07 Professor Thaler created, and has directed annually since, a nationally-unique program for Williams College students entitled "Resettling Refugees in Maine", where the students each live for over three weeks with a refugee or immigrant family and work with service providers. Jeff is married to Karen Massey, and his sons Greg and Kai are 28 and 25.
