PROFILES
Ron Borro, JD ’78, Professorial Lecturer in Law
R
on Borro’s 45 years of service for the United States Navy is hardly surprising. Indeed, his path to a career in public service began early in his childhood. “I grew up in a household where service to community and country were valued,” he said. “My father served in the Navy and was a police officer for most of the time when I was growing up. And that inspired me to give back to my country and community.” After graduating high school, Mr. Borro’s career in public service began when he received Ron Borro an appointment to the Naval Academy in 1969. When he graduated four years later, the thought of pursuing a law degree was already on his mind. “As I went through my four years at the academy and got to know more about myself and know where my skills were the strongest, the thought of law school started to develop,” he said. While he contemplated law school, Congress unveiled new legislation permitting the Navy to send select individuals to law school. Essentially, the Navy would foot the cost of law school in exchange for legal service upon graduation. Mr. Borro applied to the Navy’s Law Education Program and was accepted. He enrolled at GW Law in fall 1975. Mr. Borro graduated from GW Law in 1978 and returned to duty with the Navy as a member of the Judge Advocate Generals Corps. The broad mission of the Navy allowed him to experience an array of practice areas. His early work included criminal prosecution and defense, overseas assignments, and a stint as an Associate Professor at the U.S. Naval Academy. The opportunity to move
between practice areas was “one of the things [he] really liked about practicing law with the Navy.” Among the more memorable placements early in Mr. Borro’s career was an appointment as Staff Judge Advocate in Sicily. Specifically, he enjoyed the challenges the appointment presented. “First of all, you’re dealing with new, challenging issues on a daily basis. You were not just looking at how U.S. laws were being applied in the context of the Navy’s operations, you also were looking at how Italian laws were being applied to the Navy and individuals stationed there,” he said. “It was also a time when there was a lot going on. International tensions were high, and there were growing concerns about paramilitary movements—what we would call terrorist organizations today—like the Red Brigades. Being able to work with the U.S. government and Italian government on those issues was a great opportunity to broaden my perspective and better understand how law influenced policy and diplomacy.” One of his first environmental projects also occurred while stationed in Sicily. “We had to deal with cleaning up what had been a WWII German ammunition dump that had been long buried. It became an issue when unexploded ordnance was discovered during a routine construction project. That got me interested in what federal agencies could do in the context of protecting and securing the environment,” he said. After leaving Sicily, Mr. Borro had the opportunity to focus his practice in environmental law. As Deputy Director of Civil Litigation in the Office of the Judge Advocate General, much of his work involved policy and transactional aspects of environmental planning and compliance for military bases and facilities. He also worked on a series of cases in Nevada that dealt with the supersonic operation of jets at and near the Naval Air Station there. After 21 years of active duty, he retired in 1994. Shortly thereafter, he took his first civilian job: a position with the Navy’s Office of General Counsel. Much of his early work with this office focused
4 THE GEORGE WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY LAW SCHOOL
on developing a defensible process for conducting environmental analysis in support of Navy actions. The Navy began to focus on environmental planning after litigation challenging the adequacy of its environmental planning put a temporary stop to the mandatory shock testing of a new class of warships. Over the course of six or seven years, Mr. Borro worked with environmental planners, professional engineers, scientists, and naval officers to develop a system for environmental impact analysis that ensured Navy actions, from construction to home basing of new ships and aircraft to testing and training exercises, were in compliance with environmental laws, regulations, and standards. Between 1994 and 2007, Mr. Borro served as Senior Counsel within the Navy’s Office of the Assistant Secretary (Installations and Environment), where the majority of his work dealt with environmental planning, compliance, and clean up. In 2007, he was appointed to the Federal Senior Executive Service and assigned as Counsel, Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Installations and Environment), where he managed the office providing legal counsel in the practice areas of energy, environmental, natural resources, safety, and real estate law. He currently serves as Associate General Counsel (Litigation) within the Department of the Navy and is an adjunct professor at GW Law, where he teaches a course focused on environmental laws at federal facilities. As both an educator and litigator, Mr. Borro is presently interested in the application of environmental statutes to federal facilities, especially the interplay between sovereign immunity and environmental enforcement mechanisms. He also is interested in the principles of e-discovery and changes in the practice of law driven by advances in technology, such as artificial intelligence. For those interested in environmental law, he notes the need for environmental practitioners to work with others within and beyond the legal profession. continued on page 5