Professor Rip Verkerke walks with students at Morven Farm during the Conservation Planning and Law seminar in 2017.
While students are spread across the country enjoying their summer internships, the PLACE faculty are busy preparing for the 2025-26 academic year. As professors finalize their course offerings, we chatted with two PLACE faculty members, J. H. “Rip” Verkerke and Leon Szeptycki, to discuss their seminar, Conservation Planning and Law. This seminar provides students with hands-on experiential learning, exploring planning techniques and legal issues surrounding the protection of landscapes and their natural, historical, cultural and public use value. It is a student favorite, and one of nearly two dozen PLACE-affiliated elective courses and seminars.
The class has been around since 2016, when Professor Jon Cannon, the founder of PLACE, introduced the idea in response to a Dominion Power grant to support trail development on the grounds of the Morven Estate. Looking to find additional local projects for students to work on, he quickly reached out to Rip. The rest is history.
“Jon knew about my service as president of the Rivanna Trails Foundation (RTF) and approached me to help identify additional student projects involving conservation efforts in the Charlottesville-Albemarle area,” reflected Rip on the formation of the class.
Despite his primary scholarly focus on employment and labor law, Rip was excited to co-teach the class because he had been working on a range of conservation issues with RTF. Plus, Rip had “always loved outdoor recreation, including hiking, trail running and sailing.”
“The seminar was a great opportunity to take a more rigorous academic approach to various conservation efforts I had been engaging in for many years,” Rip explained.
After Jon’s retirement in 2021, Leon joined the class as a co-professor, bringing a keen expertise in environmental law, especially water law, to the seminar. As he shared, “I have spent most of my career working in conservation in one way or another, so the class is right in the heart of my interests and experience.”
Rip and Leon continually adjust the seminar but have settled on an approach of dividing class time between lectures or class discussions on the core legal foundations of conservation law and client working sessions. The lecture topics focus on issues such as public and private land conservation, local land use regulations, land access and liability, fostering biodiversity, and protecting historic and cultural resources.
Meanwhile, every year students work throughout the semester with clients to advance projects related to concrete legal issues or broader policy topics. While the clients are constantly shifting, they always feature both local and national organizations such as the Morven Sustainability Lab, Biophilic Cities, RTF and Trout Unlimited, among others. Students work directly with these clients to engage in a variety of lawyering tasks. Students integrate doctrine, theory, skills and legal ethics into their work all while honing their professional skills.
When reflecting on why he loves teaching the class, Rip shared that he particularly enjoys the legal foundation lectures and discussions on access and liability. He remarked that these discussions “involve a set of issues that repeatedly arise in the work I do with RTF.”
He also shared that he loves the class sessions that are devoted to students presenting on the work they are doing for their clients. “We get to see students sharing their newly acquired expertise, and the whole class engages constructively with these client projects.”
As Leon noted, this course just so happens to take place in Charlottesville, “one of the best environmental settings of any law school.”
According to Leon, the Conservation Planning and Law Seminar is just one of the many courses that sets UVA Law apart. “We have a faculty with diverse and complimentary interests, and that creates a fantastic set of courses for students.”