Profile: Angus Macbeth

Environment

Biography: Environment

Mr Macbeth has more than 25 years' experience in the practice of environmental law. Between 1977 and 1981 he served as chief of the Pollution Control Section and as deputy assistant attorney general in the Land and Natural Resources Division of the Department of Justice, where he was responsible for EPA's enforcement and defensive litigation, acquiring experience with all aspects of EPA's administration of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other statutes.

In recent years, his practice has specialised in complex matters such as contaminated sediments cases under the remedial and natural resource damage provisions of Superfund; the impact on aquatic biota of power plant operation in conjunction with mitigating wetland restoration; and the shaping and direction of corporate environmental management programmes. Mr. Macbeth has had extensive experience with multi-facility enforcement cases under the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts in addition to regulatory advocacy and challenges under those statutes. He has dealt repeatedly with state-federal issues under RCRA and the hazardous waste management statutes as well as the statutes controlling the discharge of pollutants to the environment.

Mr Macbeth has briefed and argued major issues in both federal district and appellate courts and has negotiated numerous settlements with federal and state regulators. He graduated from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, in 1969. He clerked for Judge Harold R Tyler, Jr in the Southern District of New York and was an assistant US attorney in the criminal division of the Southern District of New York. Mr Macbeth has written and spoken extensively on topics in environmental law.