At the height of his judicial career, Robert R. Merhige Jr. was perhaps the most influential federal trial judge in the United States. He made rulings ordering the desegregation of the public schools in Richmond, Virginia, and ordered the University of Virginia to admit women as students. Also among his many notable cases, was the criminal trial arising from one of the worst environmental disasters in American history, the Kepone chemical contamination of the James River, which lead to the creation of the Virginia Environmental Endowment.
