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Columns::February 25, 2002
Two Gates to Cambridge
New approach to campus parking regulations adopted
Spring Charter Lecture will deal with the relationship between man and nature
Grad School administrator says faculty key to recruitment success
Proposal for campus memorial goes before University Council Executive Committee
Watered down: Study paves way to water-efficient cotton
Iowa prof will head pharmaceutical and biomedical sciences here
Newsmakers
Merging services, expanding missions
Campus News
Professor focuses on teaching his students different ‘fields’ of law
By Heidi Murphy
hmurphy@uga.edu
When asked why he decided to teach, the first words out of Peter Appel’s mouth were, “Filthy lucre, money and short hours.”
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| One of Peter Appel’s teaching projects involved taking his students to the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests to visit land where timber was being sold. (Photo by Peter Frey) |
This, of course, was accompanied by much laughter. On the serious side, Appel says he always wanted to teach. He says as far back as applying to law school he planned on teaching, and teaching law.
“Teaching law combines the very theoretical and the very academic with the very practical,” he says. “Issues we work on range from what is property, which is very philosophical, to the proper relationship between the government and its citizens, how to draft a document and how to inform a client of difficult news or their options, in addition to ethical obligations to the profession, your client and to yourself. Law combines all of these things and is a very rich set of things to talk about.”
Appel has taken great strides in bringing to life “real world” cases for his students. He teaches courses in property law, natural resources law and environmental law, and from 1999 to 2001, he served as a Lilly Teaching Fellow at UGA. Fellows are provided funds to develop new instructional programs. Appel used his allocation to incorporate a field-study dimension for his students. He says environmental and natural resources students want to be outdoors. “Many of them are graduates of the Institute of Ecology or the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences,” he says. “Sitting inside and talking about law is one thing but seeing how it plays out in the field is another.”
Appel’s Lilly teaching project involved taking his students to the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forests to visit land where the timber was up for sale.
“Students were able to see what the forest service was doing and what they were trying to accomplish with this project and then how this intersected with the legal claims that environmental organizations were making and see if this was just operating at different levels, with different areas of concern,” he says.
He has also taken students up to Ducktown, Tenn., to visit the Tennessee Copper Company, which lost a landmark air pollution case to the state of Georgia over 100 years ago. It was one of the first big Supreme Court cases involving pollution control, Appel says.
Appel also has great interest in the international area of environmental law and policy. Issues such as global warming, fresh-water shortages and trade are of particular interest. One project on the horizon is with UGA ecologists to counter pollution in the Baltic Sea. The interdisciplinary group is currently seeking funding for their research.
This ability to work, and have contact with, other professionals in the areas of ecology, environmental policy and natural resources drew Appel to UGA. This and, of course, of the “very bright, energetic and talented” students. “All of these things make the University of Georgia a great place to be,” he says.
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