Nancy Perkins retired from Duquesne University School of Law in 2019 as Professor Emerita after more than two decades of teaching and leadership.
In 2019, Nancy Perkins retired from Duquesne University School of Law as Professor Emerita. Retirement at emerita rank marked the culmination of a sustained academic career that had begun with her arrival at the law school in 1993.
By the time she retired, Perkins had taught for more than two decades and had contributed to the law school in multiple capacities: faculty member, advisor, moot-court coach, and mentor. Her scholarship had explored the intersection of property and environmental law, with a special emphasis on sustainability, equity, and feminism. Those interests placed her within a generation of legal scholars who helped deepen environmental law’s connection to justice-oriented analysis.
The emerita designation also signals lasting institutional recognition. It preserves a faculty member’s association with the university while honoring the influence they had on its academic life. For women in legal education, such recognition is not merely ceremonial; it reflects the gradual opening of senior academic leadership and the accumulation of scholarly and pedagogical authority over time. Perkins’s retirement therefore stands as a sentinel moment in a career defined by teaching, leadership, and the shaping of environmental-law education.