In these pages, including a personal letter from Faculty Director Kristen Stilt and a first message from our new Executive Director, Lana Nadj, we detail a year of steadfast and determined work during a time of challenge and uncertainty for Harvard and for academic institutions across the country. This year also marked a milestone: more than a decade since the Program’s founding in 2014. We honored it not with a retrospective but by looking ahead, convening as a team to set priorities for ALPP’s second decade. Our visiting fellows came from Germany’s University of Regensburg and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law to pursue their research, and they published widely in venues including the German Law Journal and Verfassungsblog. We also introduced hundreds of students to Animal Law through classes, the Animal Law & Policy Clinic, our workshop series, and events, including Animal Law Week, which drew some 250 students to five days of conversations at the intersection of animal welfare, human rights, and constitutional law. In this report you will hear from many of those students in their own words, describing how their thinking, their career plans, and in some cases the course of their lives have changed.
In this issue of our Year in Review, we particularly highlight the completion of The Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law, co-edited by Kristen Stilt with Anne Peters and Saskia Stucki, which establishes Global Animal Law as a field of study. The Handbook opens with the story of Koro, a donkey in Kenya caught in the global trade in donkey hides, whose fate is shaped by many overlapping laws, norms, and jurisdictions. Its six parts cover environmental, food and agricultural, health, trade, and human rights law. It includes country and religion reports centered on understudied jurisdictions, examines implementation and enforcement, and identifies new horizons for the field. Members of the ALPP team contributed chapters throughout. Its introduction, “Global Animal Law in the Making”, is already available as a stand-alone paper.
This year we also launched Phase 1 of the Assessment for Continuous Improvement, a major new project supported by Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy). It will assess and promote improvements in the welfare of farmed land animals around the world, beginning with pilots in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, India, and Malaysia. With a seed grant from the Harvard University Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, we convened lawyers, scholars, tribal leaders, and advocates from the rights of nature and climate change movements for a two-day workshop that we expect will bear fruit for years to come. Our work also reached the public through The New York Times’ coverage of Ann Linder’s research on the global wildlife trade and zoonotic disease, and through Kristen Stilt’s appearance on Radiolab.
The pages that follow showcase much of what we accomplished last year. Our successes and impact have been made possible by our extended community: those of you who come to our events, who share our publications and reports, and who support us financially. We hope you recognize your own contributions to our work as you review these pages. What remains remarkable about our work is how much more there is that we want to do, that we must do, and that, with your support, we will do.
Harvard University’s Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program Year in Review for 2025-2026
2023-2024 Year in Review
Among the many impactful projects that we highlight in our 2023–2024 Year in Review, we want to highlight the completion of our multi-year, internationally collaborative Live Animal Markets Project, led by Ann Linder, Associate Director of Research and Policy. The report, Animal Markets and Zoonotic Disease Risk: A Global Synthesis of a 15 Country Study, is one of the most comprehensive assessments to date of zoonotic risk, offering an in-depth analysis of potential risks posed by animal markets and their supply chains across 15 countries and six continents, incorporating scientific findings, field observations, data, interviews, local and regional regulatory analysis, and other research to describe and analyze what is known about the zoonotic risks posed by animal markets and other related forms of animal industries. Beginning in 2020, the report was researched and written in collaboration with NYU’s Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. The U.S. case study was independently published in July of 2023 and exclusively featured in The New York Times; the global report was published in June of 2024 and exclusively featured in USA Today. Both continue to be cited and reported widely in the media around the world.
2022-2023 Year in Review
ALPP’s eighth year was marked by several notable achievements, including our successful efforts to defend California’s sales ban on animal products produced through certain forms of intensive confinement at the U.S. Supreme Court. Our amicus brief, written in the Clinic, presented the justices with images and descriptions of the intensive confinement of pigs and the egregious suffering it causes. Our brief engaged with the complex arguments of the dormant commerce clause while also giving the justices an unflinching picture of the actual conditions in which these animals are forced to live. Our highlights of the year also included favorable rulings in our ongoing campaign to enhance the psychological welfare of primates utilized in research, and the introduction of a new seminar on farmed animal law, created and taught by our Faculty Director, Professor Kristen Stilt.
2021-2022 Year in Review
As we enter our eighth year, the Animal Law & Policy Program has a huge agenda to solve some of the most pressing problems of today, from the devastating impact of industrial animal agriculture on the lives of animals, humans, and our planet, to the suffering of animals used in research or entertainment, and those killed for sport.
2020-2021 Year in Review
After a productive year of litigation, learning, and teaching remotely, our Animal Law & Policy Program team and Fellows returned to the Harvard Law School campus in September excited to work together and collaborate in person once again. We are grateful to be able to share with you this account of all our Program and Clinic’s accomplishments from the past academic year.
2019-2020 Year in Review
As we celebrate our sixth anniversary, the Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School is proud to share the work we have done to benefit the lives of animals farmed for food, animals used in biomedical research, animals affected by climate change, and those suffering a multitude of other harms.
2018-2019 Year in Review
As we complete our fifth year, the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program has broadened its existing focus on the welfare of animals raised for food to include the regulation of plant-based and cell-based alternatives to animal products, along with federal legislation that could have rolled back scores of state farmed animal welfare laws.
