Geoffrey Garver is an environmental consultant and lecturer in law in Montreal.  From 2000 to 2007, he was a senior official at the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation, directing the unit that publishes detailed factual investigations of complaints by North American citizens that one of the NAFTA countries – Mexico, the United States, and Canada – is failing to effectively enforce its environmental law. At the CEC, he wrote reports on enforcement of laws on water pollution from Canadian pulp and paper mills, harm to fish habitat from logging in British Columbia, and the killing of migratory birds by timber harvesting in the United States. Previously, he spent nine years with the U.S. Justice Department’s Environment and Natural Resource Division, first as a trial attorney and then as an acting assistant chief handling cases dealing with land and natural resource management, water rights, and environmental impact assessment. Some of his major cases concerned the Everglades’ water quality, winter use and bison management in Yellowstone National Park, and water rights in Idaho and Oregon.

From 1993 to 1995, Garver was senior policy counsel in the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Before joining the U.S. Justice Department in 1989, he was a judicial clerk for Judge Conrad Cyr in the federal district court in Bangor, Maine. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 1982 and a juris doctor degree, cum laude, from the University of Michigan Law School in 1987. At Michigan, he was an editor of the Michigan Law Review.

Garver grew up in a Quaker family in rural western New York.