W Taylor Reveley III

Walter Taylor Reveley III (born January 6, 1943) is the twenty-eighth president of the College of William & Mary. Formerly Dean of the William and Mary Law School, Reveley was appointed interim president of the College on February 12, 2008 following Gene Nichol's resignation earlier that day and was officially appointed the College's 27th president for a full, three-year term by the Board of Visitors on September 5, 2008. On April 27, 2012, the Board of Visitors voted to extend Reveley's term through June 2015. Later in November 2013, the Board of Visitors, still very pleased with Reveley's work, voted to extend his contract through at least June 2017.

Reveley had been a finalist for the presidency of William & Mary in 2005, during the candidate search that ended with Nichol's hiring. With his appointment, now made permanent, Reveley holds two positions at the College, as he is also the John Stewart Bryan Professor of Jurisprudence at the law school.

Reveley's areas of academic specialty include administrative law, citizen lawyers, commercial nuclear power, and Constitutional Law - war powers. He is the author of the 1981 book War Powers of the President and Congress: Who Holds the Arrows and the Olive Branch?, and was a co-director of the National War Powers Commission. Reveley received his B.A. from Princeton University in 1965 while earning a Phi Beta Kappa distinction for academic excellence. He then received his J.D. from the University of Virginia in 1968 while earning the Order of the Coif distinction. He was a clerk for Justice William J. Brennan Jr. in 1969.

Before joining William and Mary, Reveley practiced law for many years at Hunton & Williams, a major law firm in Richmond, Virginia, specializing in energy matters, especially those involving commercial nuclear power. He was the managing partner of the firm for nine years. Reveley has also spent a significant amount of time on non-profit organizations, serving on many education and cultural boards, including those of Princeton University (where he is a trustee emeritus), Union Theological Seminary in Virginia, St. Christopher's School, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, JSTOR, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the Virginia Historical Society, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, the Richmond Symphony, and the Presbyterian Church (USA) Foundation.

His father, W. Taylor Reveley II, served as president of Hampden-Sydney College from 1963 to 1977. Years later, on May 8th, 2016 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the institution his father oversaw. His son, W. Taylor Reveley IV, was appointed in April 2013 as the new president of Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia.

On April 7, 2017, Reveley announced that he will retire as president of the College on June 30, 2018.