Staff Spotlight: Meet Kristen Fletcher

Visiting a Boston container port, commercial trawling on Narragansett Bay, and hiking through conservation land on Block Island are just part of the curriculum for law students participating in the summer program at the Marine Affairs Institute at Roger Williams University School of Law.

Kristen Fletcher, director of the institute and of the Rhode Island Sea Grant Legal Program, sees those opportunities as giving students a “healthy mix” of coursework and the opportunity to talk to people who work in environmental areas and get out in the field. The program is also part of her efforts to guide future lawyers to be a little less, well, litigious.

The Marine Affairs Institute, which provides legal research on marine issues in Rhode Island and the region in partnership with the URI marine affairs department, originally focused on maritime and shipping law. When Fletcher became the institute’s first full-time director in 2003, and with support from Rhode Island Sea Grant in 2004, she began broadening its focus to include natural resources and environmental law and policy. Now, issues such as land use, erosion, natural hazards, and environmental justice are incorporated into the curriculum and highlighted by speakers and symposia.  Students, through the Sea Grant Law Fellows program, also have the opportunity to gain practical work experience in these areas.

Fletcher says, “What we’ve been trying to do is train students to see problems in a different way, so they can respond in a proactive way instead of litigation.”

Nevertheless, “I think litigation has its place,” she says, referring to the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision in Massachusetts v. EPA that EPA was authorized to regulate motor vehicle emissions on the basis of their possible climate change impacts. “EPA was not going to act unless it got sued,” Fletcher says.

Still, Fletcher wants to help give law students the skills to communicate with other professionals to “come up with a better solution than suing someone.” For instance, laws regarding the siting of alternative energy facilities along the coastline must be created or the industry won’t develop. But to determine what those laws should look like, lawyers need to be able to communicate with scientists who can tell them what effects the facility will have on the environment, and with economists who can tell them what the impacts on the economic sector will be, Fletcher says.

The institute’s programs have impacted marine law students and lawyers alike, Fletcher says, helping them approach problems not just as lawyers. She says that many of the students in the marine law program “are not necessarily looking for traditional law firm jobs.” Instead, they work for state and federal agencies or nonprofits that are working on changing policy at the state and federal level. “Nonprofits and the government sector look favorably on students with this type of experience and analytical skills,” Fletcher says.

She points to the Sea Grant Law Fellows, who have performed a variety of legal research projects that provide a public service. She cites Tara Janosh, a 2005 Law Fellow who worked with the R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council (CRMC) performing title research on rights-of-way in the state. As a result of her findings, CRMC was able to recognize new rights-of-way, a designation that protects them from being lost to public use.

Jennifer Mahaffey, a 2007 Law Fellow provided substantial research to the city of Warwick to update its harbor management plan. The city has since adopted the plan. Mahaffey was selected a Sea Grant Knauss Fellow in 2008, and will be heading to Washington, D.C., for a year of work in the federal government on coastal and marine issues.

How did Fletcher herself become interested in law? “I was a very argumentative child,” she jokes, “At least that’s what my father would say.”

She grew up in South Carolina, where she says she “completely took the ocean and the beach for granted.”

“I always had a leaning towards political science and law. In my junior year of college, I took some geology classes and became more and more interested in the environment,” she says.

She went on to receive her law degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master of laws in environmental and natural resources law from Lewis and Clark Law School. She was specifically interested in working in marine law, “but there were only a handful of jobs available,” she says. “I got really lucky and was hired by the University of Mississippi and Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant as a staff attorney.” She later became director of the state program and finally director of the Sea Grant Law Center before coming to Rhode Island.

Fletcher is, in a way, an advocate for the voiceless.  “There’s a part of our world that really can’t defend itself, that being the natural world,” she says.