Ronald J. Tenpas

Partner

Ronald J. Tenpas co-chairs Morgan Lewis's Environmental and Climate Change Practices and is also active in the firm's White Collar, Government Relations, and Congressional Investigations Practices.

Prior to joining Morgan Lewis, Mr. Tenpas served as the Assistant Attorney General (AAG) for the Environment and Natural Resources Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. In that role, he managed a 700-person division that included 400 attorneys, overseeing civil and criminal litigation arising under more than 150 environmental and natural resources laws. In that capacity, he also advised Cabinet and White House officials on policy and litigation risks associated with the environmental laws. The Division's major client agencies included the Environmental Protection Agency and the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Energy, Homeland Security, and Interior. This included litigation in which regulated entities challenge new regulatory commands, and matters in which the government sought to enforce environmental laws due to alleged civil or criminal violations or sought to recover environmental clean-up costs. These matters typically arise under statutes such as the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, CERCLA (Superfund), RCRA, the Pipeline Safety Act, and others. For his service, Mr. Tenpas received the Justice Department's highest honor, the Edmund Randolph Award. During his tenure, a survey of federal workers resulted in ENRD being ranked the number one place to work within the federal government and Mr. Tenpas and his senior management team were also ranked first governmentwide in the employees' rankings of their senior management. His current environmental practice focuses on environmental litigation and counseling under a broad range of environmental statutes.

Prior to serving as AAG, Mr. Tenpas served as an Associate Deputy Attorney General, as the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Illinois, and as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Maryland and the Middle District of Florida. In these positions, Mr. Tenpas personally investigated and tried a variety of white collar matters, including those involving health care fraud and public corruption. He has testified five times before Congress on matters ranging from environmental enforcement to health care fraud to insider trading to identity theft. He chaired the Justice Department's health care fraud coordinating committee, served on the Attorney General's Advisory Committee of United States Attorneys, and served as Executive Director of the seventeen agency Identity Theft Task Force.

Before initially entering private practice and then joining the Justice Department, Mr. Tenpas served as a law clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court (1991–1992); Judge Louis H. Pollak of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania (1990–1991); and Judge Howard Holtzmann of the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands (1992–1993).

Mr. Tenpas received his J.D. from the University of Virginia School of Law in 1990, where he was editor-in-chief of the Virginia Law Review and named to the Order of the Coif. He received a postgraduate B.A. in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford University, Balliol College in 1987, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, and his B.A., with high honors, in international relations from Michigan State University in 1985.

Mr. Tenpas is admitted to practice in the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Florida.