This course examines the legal treatment of wild animals and wild places. It analyzes the property law and constitutional underpinnings of state and federal wildlife and wilderness laws. Considerable attention will be devoted to the protection of biodiversity through the Endangered Species Act and the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species. The course will also focus on the Wilderness Act. Other topics may include feral and urban wildlife, hunting and fishing, and the special case of American Indians’ rights to wildlife. The course will also focus on policy questions raised by legal protections for wildlife and wilderness, including critical examination of both the purposes served by these protections and the costs these protections impose.

The trial advocacy course employs a learning-by-doing approach. Thus, most of the course will involve the practice of trial skills including direct and cross examination, opening statements, closing arguments, and jury selection, in a simulated courtroom environment. During the last two weeks of the course, each student will participate as co-counsel in a full-length simulated civil or criminal trial with a sitting Rhode Island judge or professor presiding.

These courses provide an introduction to the law of liability for civil wrongs. Topics include intentional torts, negligence, strict liability, nuisance and damages.

The Nature of the Judicial Process was published in 1921 by Justice Benjamin J. Cardozo and remains one of the most important and influential treatments of the topic.  The professor, the Honorable Stephen J. Fortunato, is a retired Associate Justice of the Rhode Island Superior Court.