August 5, 2004

2004 Summer School Lecture Series: Endangered Species Act

The Environmental Law Institute hosted a series of free lectures in Washington, DC to provide an introduction to the legal foundations of environmental protection in the United States. Summer law clerks, interns, and others who would want to acquire a working knowledge of the basics were invited to attend. Each presentation was made by an experienced practitioner and provided an overview of the history, main provisions, and essential vocabulary of the specific statute.

John Kostyack (National Wildlife Federation) and Eric Bilsky (Oceana) discussed the Endangered Species Act.

Mr. Kostyack manages the Federation’s Wildlife Conservation program, which employs lobbying, litigation and grassroots mobilization to protect and restore endangered species and other imperiled wildlife. As Senior Counsel in the National Wildlife Federation’s Washington, DC office, he represents NWF and other environmental groups in several legal initiatives, including cases challenging the federal government’s failure to protect the Florida panther and its decision to abandon further recovery of the gray wolf. He also speaks regularly on the Endangered Species Act before Congress, federal agencies and conferences and workshops around the country.

Eric Bilsky holds the position of Senior Attorney with Oceana, an international marine conservation organization. As an attorney with the Ocean Law Project of Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund and with Oceana, he has fought for marine conservation over a range of cases and issues arising under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Endangered Species Act. The results of these cases have included court orders that the federal government rebuild the severely overfished New England groundfish fisheries, address the problem of wasteful and unaccounted for discarding (or bycatch) and develop Environmental Impact Statements for fisheries concerning the impacts of fishing practices on habitat for marine species (essential fish habitat).