AROUND THE LAW SCHOOL
Animal Law How do you protect the interests of beings that have no legal standing? Can you equate the treatment of animals to historical abuses of segments of the human race? These are the kinds of questions that a growing body of lawyers and law students are exploring through animal law. By Delcianna Winders ’06
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Illustration by Alex Nabaum
ark! Who goes there? With about 50 law schools offering it as a course of study, animal law is emerging as a serious legal academic field. In its ninth year, the NYU chapter of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund (SALDF) was particularly active, hosting several events a month and sending participants to Harvard Law School to participate in the National Animal Advocacy Competition. Further evidence of animal law’s growing popularity is that non-animal-focused organizations cosponsored events with SALDF. The tone for the year was set last fall when renowned philosopher Tom Regan—often called the philosophical father of the modern animal rights movement—discussed
his book Empty Cages: Facing the Challenge of Animal Rights to a capacity crowd in Greenberg Lounge. The book, published in 2004, explores the ways in which our legal system often operates to legitimize institutionalized cruelty to animals used for food, clothing and research. Most of the speakers throughout the year focused on challenging cultural attitudes toward animals. Most controversially, Charles Patterson, the author of Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, was the guest of SALDF in November. He argued that the justification for killing animals because they are lesser beings shares certain similarities to the historical justifications offered for genocide. The holocaust wasn’t the only historical analogy that came up throughout the
year. Dr. Paul Waldau, director of the Center for Animals and Public Policy at Tufts University spoke in February as part of the Public Interest Law Center’s Monday Night Speaker Series on “Animal Law, Cultural Change and Public Policy.” Waldau emphasized the cultural transitions underlying the increased attention to animal suffering in our society, and the relationship between law and culture. He suggested that subtle shifts in language can make a serious difference, encouraging students to speak of “nonhuman animals” instead of just animals. “The cultural shifts are not going to come easily,” he said, just as, for example, “ending race-based slavery was hard.” Indeed, Steven Wise, another SALDF speaker, underscored the lessons animal law can draw from previous legal transitions, while also being attentive to the distinctions between animal law and historical legal transitions focused on human populations. A legal historian and animal law practitioner with over 20 years of experience, Wise visited the campus last year with sponsorship from the Office of the Vice Dean. Author of the ground-breaking book Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, which has shaped the terms of animal law discourse, Wise discussed his most recent work, Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial that Led to the End of Human Slavery, just weeks after it was
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THE LAW SCHOOL
AUTUMN 2005