Board Member

Robert Vaughn is professor of law emeritus at American University Washington College of Law.  Throughout his career, he has received nine awards for outstanding teaching, five awards for scholarship, and won American University’s highest faculty award, Teacher/Scholar of the Year. While teaching as a visiting professor at the University of San Diego Law School, the student body elected him Professor of the Year.  

He has written on a variety of topics regarding public employment law, public information law, consumer law, the role of the federal courts, federal civil procedure, and whistleblower protection. His books on public employment law cover civil service reform, principles of civil service law, conflict of interest regulation in the federal government and the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. His public employment law articles address topics, such as the right to disobey illegal orders, ethics in government, restrictions on the political activities of federal employees, the role of public employment law in the transition to democracy, public service ethics in Britain, and the challenge of whistleblower laws to public employment laws.

His 1972 study of the federal civil service, subsequently published as a book, argued for civil service reform and contained an early draft of a whistleblower law that foreshadowed the whistleblower provision of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978. His articles on whistleblower protection address important laws, such as the whistleblower provision of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, the whistleblower provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, state whistleblower laws, and a proposed whistleblower law to implement the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption. His 2012 book, The Successes and Failures Whistleblower Laws, explores the development of whistleblower laws in the United States and abroad and analyzes topics relevant to the evaluation of these laws. He is also the editor of an anthology of articles regarding whistleblower laws.