Event

Event Overview

The prosecuting state and criminal enforcement hold a paradoxical status for persons interested in animal rights. On the one hand, mainstream organizations and the public at large celebrate criminal prosecutions for abusers. The movement lobbies for harsher penalties, celebrates imprisonment, and even funds prosecutors as a presumed way of advancing the status of animals in the law. At the same time, activists are increasingly the subject of federal and state investigations and prosecutions. Prosecution is both weaponized against activists and a weapon of choice for more mainstream animal law organizations.

Justin Marceau is a Professor of Law and the Brooks Institute Faculty Research Scholar of Animal Law and Policy at the University of Denver, and he is currently a visiting professor at here at Harvard Law School. He splits his scholarship between animal law and criminal law, researching, writing, and litigating in both fields. His animal law scholarship includes his recent monograph, Beyond Cages, and his litigation includes leading the efforts to challenge Ag-Gag laws.

Hadar Aviram is the Thomas Miller Professor at UC Hastings College of the Law, where she teaches and writes on the criminal process from a law and society perspective. She is the author of several books, the latest of which is Yesterday’s Monsters: The Manson Family Cases and the Illusion of Parole (forthcoming: UC Press 2020). Professor Aviram has published on domestic violence, behavioral perspectives on policing, prosecutorial and defense behavior, unconventional family units, public trust in the police, correctional policy, criminal justice budget policy, and the history of female crime and punishment. She served as President of the Western Society of Criminology and as a Trustee of the Law and Society Association. One of the leading voices in California and nationwide against mass incarceration, Professor Aviram is a frequent media commentator on politics, immigration, criminal justice policy, civil rights, the Trump Administration, and the Mueller Report. Her popular blog California Correctional Crisis covers crime and punishment in California. In Fall 2019, Hadar was a visiting fellow at the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, where she started working on her book-length project about direct action animal liberation activists facing criminal trials for rescuing animals from factory farms.