News

After eight exceptional years partnering with Faculty Director Professor Kristen Stilt to lead the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School, Chris Green will embark on a new leadership role as Executive Director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund beginning in September 2023.

As ALPP’s inaugural Executive Director, Chris helped to grow the team from three to 30 people, including faculty, staff, fellows, and visiting scholars. This and other accomplishments recently were featured in a Harvard Law School Bulletin cover story. Chris also helped to secure an unprecedented $10 million endowment from the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law & Policy that will help carry the Program’s work forward for years to come.

“Chris has been a tremendously positive force at ALPP, managing a diverse and intense workload while also always being willing to take on something new,” said Professor Stilt. His commitment to the mission of the Program and to animal protection in general is unwavering. ALDF is very fortunate to have Chris in the Executive Director role to lead the organization through its next stage of its growth and development.”

Prior to returning to his alma mater law school to help build ALPP, Chris established ALDF’s Legislative Affairs Program and served as its director from 2013–2015. As ALDF’s next Executive Director, Chris aims to pioneer new and collaborative strategies to build on the organization’s expansive work of defending animals’ interests across the entire spectrum of legal advocacy.

“Between my years with the Animal Law & Policy Program, and as a former student, I’ve spent a significant fraction of my life at Harvard Law School,” Chris said. “What our team has built here together forever will remain one of the most meaningful accomplishments and experiences I’ve ever been blessed to share. This past year has been our best yet and I look forward to seeing ALPP continue to expand and thrive with the benefit of new and additional perspectives that others may bring to the role. I am so grateful to all the students, fellows, faculty, staff, and most importantly, Kristen and our ALPP team for making this the single most rewarding job I’ve ever had.”

During his time with ALPP, Chris’s infectious energy, work ethic, warmth, and support of others, endeared him to colleagues and students throughout the law school. One of his proudest achievements was helping to secure administrative approval and philanthropic support to launch Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic in 2019 – where up to 20 students each semester receive course credit to work on the Clinic’s own animal protection lawsuits, policy initiatives, and regulatory matters. That same year, Chris also helped inaugurate the Brooks Animal Law Digest which he still helps produce to share all the latest developments in the field of animal law and policy with over 1,700 weekly subscribers.

Our Clinic has partnered with ALDF on many critical animal protection cases and looks forward to continuing to do so with Chris at the helm. One of Chris’s many legacies is the relationships he has fostered with and among animal protection organizations, schools, programs, professors, law firms, business leaders, journalists, and others, in pursuit of greater protections for animals.

Recently Chris helped a number of journalists understand the nuances of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Prop 12 case. And the day before the Supreme Court heard oral arguments last October, the LA Times published an Op-Ed about the lawsuit that Chris co-authored with ALPP’s former Legislative Policy Fellow Kelsey Eberly and the esteemed Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe – who actually taught Constitutional Law to Chris when he was a student at HLS.

Just this week, Chris was in Washington DC giving congressional briefings on the EATS Act, which has the potential to nullify farmed animal protections in several states. To help inform decision makers about the negative impacts such legislation might cause, Chris recently brought HLS alumna Kelley McGill onto the ALPP team as a Regulatory Policy Fellow. In that role she is crafting the Clinic’s positions and comments on alternative protein regulatory matters and producing a major report on the EATS Act that builds upon the Program’s 2018 report on the King Amendment.

Kelley is among many former students that Chris has assisted and mentored both during law school and afterward as they secure meaningful roles in the animal protection movement. Indeed, his support of others in the field was one of the many reasons Chris was recognized last year with the American Bar Association’s award for “Excellence in the Advancement of Animal Law.”

The team at Harvard’s Animal Law & Policy Program is immensely grateful for Chris’s consummate leadership and wishes him well. The search for the Program’s next Executive Director will be announced soon.