KU News Release

Law students witness biodiversity law in action on Virgin Islands research trip

From left to right: Erin Weekley, Kasey Barton, Jennifer Haaga, Annabel Filbert, Kate Miller and Andrew Torrance

LAWRENCE — This week, while all of Mount Oread shivers in the Kansas winter, University of Kansas law professor Andrew Torrance and five students are snorkeling and holding class on beaches in the Virgin Islands, getting an up-close look at one of the most biologically diverse sites on the planet.

Torrance has been teaching biodiversity law in the Caribbean islands for 10 years, the first seven at Harvard University and the last three at KU. The class, which Torrance thinks is one of the only biodiversity law courses offered in the world, considers the role of law in regulating, managing, utilizing and conserving the Earth’s rich biological diversity.

As humans continue to strain the Earth’s ecosystems, biodiversity law is fast becoming one of the most important branches of environmental law, said Torrance, associate professor of law.

“We don’t understand much about biodiversity at all, and yet we’re liquidating it at alarming rates,” he said. “I think the issues that it represents both in the U.S. and internationally are issues that will affect the future of humanity directly. We’re only now realizing how serious those effects may be.”

Torrance knows of no better location than the Virgin Islands to study the topic.

“The Virgin Islands have a disproportionately large amount of biodiversity that occurs in a small geographic area,” Torrance said. “They have a number of stark differences in the way that the land is managed between the islands.”

For example, he explained, the densely populated island of St. Thomas, which is mostly privately owned and has no parks, sits next to an island of similar size, St. John, which has less than one-tenth of the population of St. Thomas but two-thirds of its land set aside as national park.

“So there’s a natural experiment that’s been run over the last 200 years,” Torrance said. “These two islands have similar size, similar biodiversity, but the way the land has been managed is completely different. In the space of one day, we can travel all around St. Thomas and see the results of development on biodiversity, and then take a ferry ride across to St. John and see the consequences of heavy legal protection on biodiversity.”

Students in the class, which began last weekend and runs through Sunday, prepared for the intense week of fieldwork by reading books on biodiversity law and science and then responding to discussion questions. They were also required to take an environmental law survey course taught by Robert Glicksman, the Robert W. Wagstaff Distinguished Professor of Law and a nationally known expert in environmental law.

When the students return from the islands, they will write a major research paper. In the meantime, Torrance and his students are sharing their observations through daily blog updates. http://biolaw.blogspot.com/

Erin Weekley, a second-year law student from Fairway, said the trip has hammered home ideas she had only been able to read about in textbooks.

“You can see right in front of you the actual examples and the actual impacts,” she said. “It makes a bigger impression on you. It’s a beautiful place and people care about it, and seeing the actual impact yourself makes you care that much more about what you’re doing.”

The class covers a range of legal issues, including endangered species, marine conservation, land use and international biodiversity law. The tropical location allows students to observe coral reefs on the same day that they hike into tropical rain forests. They met Wednesday morning with a Fish and Wildlife officer who was measuring the population of Cuban tree frogs at a Nature Conservancy site, where the invasive species is wreaking havoc despite laws designed to prevent such damage. Later that day the class spoke with the local director of the Trust for Public Land, who had recently used clever interpretations of property law to negotiate the rare purchase of a 400-acre parcel on St. John to be set aside as national park and protected in perpetuity.

Over a decade of visits to the islands, Torrance has built relationships with scientists, environmentalists and politicians interested in biodiversity law. As a result, he and his students were guests on Monday at the swearing-in ceremony of Senate President Adlah “Foncie” Donastorg Jr., who delivered the keynote address at the law school’s biolaw symposium in 2007. Donastorg will be spearheading a number of biodiversity initiatives during his tenure and has accompanied the class to several sites during its visit.

“You can’t get access like that to politicians on the mainland. He can give us the inside story of how policy gets made and law gets made,” Torrance said. “The richness of the experience here is unique, and the friendliness and accessibility of the experts is unique.”

Sebastian Patti, a Chicago judge and 1978 graduate of the law school, provided startup funding for the course.

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