Animal Law Mariann Sullivan, Law Professor, Pundit, Vegan

On today’s episode, I will be talking to Margie Robinson, an attorney with the Humane Society of the United States. Margie will be telling us about Humane Society of the United States v National Institutes of Health, the latest lawsuit in the years-long effort to relocate to sanctuary ALL the chimpanzees formerly held for research by the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies. 



It seems unbelievable that the NIH still retains some chimpanzees in a lab setting despite the Chimpanzee Health Improvement, Maintenance, and Protection (CHIMP) Act being passed by Congress in 2000. The CHIMP Act sets forth rules establishing a federal sanctuary program funded in substantial part by the federal government and mandating that eligible chimpanzees be retired to those sanctuaries. But, even though the chimpanzees still held in laboratory settings are fully eligible under the Act to be sent to sanctuary, the NIH has yet to comply fully, so here we are. 



Sometimes –  all too often – getting a statute passed to protect animals is only the beginning of the legal effort. 



Margie Robinson is a staff attorney at the Humane Society of the United States and has taught an animal law seminar at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School. Her current practice focuses on protecting wildlife both in the wild and in captivity, including countering cruel trophy hunting practices, advocating for former research chimpanzees, and defending fur sales bans.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP93/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization, Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

On this episode, I will be talking to Taimie Bryant, a law professor at UCLA School of Law. She will explain some of the ins and outs of a law review article she recently published in the Marquette Law Review entitled “Novel Food Ingredients: Food Safety Law, Animal Testing, and Consumer Perspectives.” This article involves the question of what the FDA actually requires in order to authorize a new food product. Central to that question, as well as to a controversy about the development of Impossible Burgers, is whether animal testing is required in order to bring a new food to the market. And, even if it isn’t required, is it wise for companies to reduce their legal risks by performing such testing? This is an essential question, as we are seeing so many new vegan foods hit the market, and most of us are hoping for more. But will animals have to suffer and die for that to happen?



In addition to her other areas of expertise, Taimie Bryant has taught courses on animal law at UCLA Law School since 1994 and directs both the UCLA Animal Law and Policy Small Grants Program and the UCLA Dog Administrative Hearings Clinic. She has worked on legislation involving animal shelter law reform, declawing of cats, and currently, prohibiting glue traps. She has also written widely about topics related to animal law, including legal personhood, vegan enterprises, regulation of genetic manipulation of animals as artistic expression, and, most recently, the lack of legal requirements to test novel food ingredients on animals. 




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP92/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization, Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

Today I will be talking to Raffael Fasel and Sean Butler, who are the founders of the Cambridge Center for Animal Rights Law at Cambridge University in the UK. They are doing something quite special — a series of workshops in various parts of the world seeking to help law professors and lawyers, and perhaps some others, develop courses at their universities to teach Animal Rights Law. The next workshop,  held in conjunction with Vermont Law School, will be located in Burlington, Vermont in May, 2023, and registration is still open for those who might be interested in attending. But even if that’s not possible for you, I think you will have a lot to learn from this interview about their vision of what Animal Rights Law could be, different approaches that various workshop participants are taking to the topic, and their thoughts about the role of the law in moving the world forward regarding the way animals are seen and treated.



Dr. Raffael Fasel is an Affiliated Lecturer at the Cambridge Law Faculty, a Visiting Scholar & Affiliate at the Center for Law and Philosophy, NYU School of Law, and a SNSF Senior Researcher at the University of Zurich. His main research areas are human and animal rights law and constitutional theory. Together with Dr Sean Butler he co-founded the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law.



Dr. Sean Butler is an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge, UK, and a Fellow of St Edmund's College, Cambridge. His academic interests include law and life of Ancient Rome, and animal rights law. He is co-founder (with Dr Raffael Fasel) of the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law (https://animalrightslaw.org/).




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP91/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization, Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

On this episode, I will be talking to Alene Anello, whose law firm, Legal Impact for Chickens, is pursuing a shareholder derivative case against Costco regarding the treatment of the poor little birds whose bodies end up being their extremely popular, and very cheap, rotisserie chickens. Essentially, in Smith v Vachris, currently pending in Superior Court in King County, Washington, Legal Impact for Chickens is suing Costco's executives on behalf of two of its shareholders for violating their fiduciary duty to act lawfully by causing the company to neglect chickens. Neglecting animals, including chickens raised for food, is, as we all know, supposed to be against the law but is virtually never brought to court because prosecutors aren’t interested. Well, this case is aiming to do just that in an innovative way. If the last time you heard about shareholder derivative actions was in law school, don’t worry. Alene breaks it all down for us in this fascinating interview.



Alene Anello founded Legal Impact for Chickens, a litigation nonprofit that fights factory-farm cruelty. Alene has degrees from Harvard College and Harvard Law School. She previously worked at PETA, the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and the Good Food Institute.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP90/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization, Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

On this episode I will be discussing a case that a lot of you have no doubt heard of, and that is National Pork Producers Council v Ross, which was recently argued in the Supreme Court. This case brings into question the constitutionality of Proposition 12, something else which many of you may be familiar with, by which California set certain limits on the sale of pork that is derived from pigs whose mothers were subjected to the particular torture of gestation crates – the very tiny metal enclosures where they are kept during their pregnancies. The thing that many of us may NOT be so familiar with is the constitutional issue at play here, that is, the application of the Dormant Commerce Clause. If that is, at best, a vague memory from law school, you have come to the right place. My guest today is Michael Dorf, who is a renowned expert in constitutional law and a vegan advocate for farmed animals everywhere. He is going to break down for us what the Dormant Commerce Clause is, why it’s dormant, and what the Justices of the Supreme Court seemed to be most interested in when they recently heard this case.



Michael C. Dorf is the Robert S. Stevens Professor of Law at Cornell Law School, where he teaches constitutional law, federal courts, and related subjects. He has authored or co-authored six books (including, with Sherry Colb, Beating Hearts: Abortion and Animal Rights) and over one hundred scholarly articles and essays for law journals and peer-reviewed science and social science journals. His most recent work of scholarship (co-authored with Sherry Colb) is “If We Didn’t Eat Them, They Wouldn’t Exist”: The Nonidentity Problem’s Implications for Animals (Including Humans), in The American Journal of Law and Equality. He also frequently writes for the general public. In addition to occasional contributions to The New York Times, USA Today, CNN.com, The Los Angeles Times, and other wide-circulation publications, Professor Dorf has been writing a bi-weekly column since 2000 and publishes a popular blog, Dorf on Law. Dorf received his undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard. He served as a law clerk for Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and then for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court. He maintains an active pro bono practice mostly consisting of writing Supreme Court briefs.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP89/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization, Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).

On this episode, I will be discussing State of Utah v Hsiung, the case that has everyone in the movement talking. Wayne Hsiung and Jon Frohnmeyer will be here to discuss the prosecution of Wayne, along with his co-defendant Paul Picklesimer, for burglary and theft for entering a huge Smithfield factory farm in Utah and, while there, rescuing two sick piglets. The trial is set to begin in early October. Among other things, we will discuss whether, and how, the necessity defense exists in Utah and, if so, whether it applies to the right to rescue sick and dying animals, and whether, given their condition, these piglets could be said to have any monetary "value," as required by the charges.



Wayne Hsiung is a lawyer, former faculty member at Northwestern School of Law, former lead organizer of the global animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), and co-founder of The Sanctuary Initiative. He has led teams that have rescued dozens of animals from factory farms, and has organized successful campaigns to ban fur in San Francisco and California. He faces decades in prison for challenging so-called “ag gag” laws across the nation and removing animals from labs, slaughterhouses, and farms for veterinary care. His work as an open rescue activist has been reported on in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and ABC’s Nightline. Wayne published research (with Cass Sunstein) on climate change’s impact on wildlife, practiced law at two national firms, and had an active pro bono practice defending victims of domestic violence.



Jon Frohnmayer is an attorney and activist with Direct Action Everywhere. He graduated from Stanford University and the University of Oregon School of Law, where he was Editor in Chief of the Oregon Law Review and President of the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund. He worked for several years doing transactional law before moving into animal rights.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP88/

The Animal Law Podcast is released by the nonprofit organization, Our Hen House. Share your thoughts with us on social media! Find us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (@ourhenhouse).