Animal Law Our Hen House Podcasts

Larissa Liebmann, a Senior Staff Attorney with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, joins me to discuss ALDF v Becerra, in which the plaintiffs are suing the Food and Drug Administration regarding its authorization of the use of a drug known as Experior that is being administered to cattle in spite of potential harms to the animals, the environment, and to people who either work at feedlots or eat the flesh of those cows. The purported purpose of this drug is to reduce the impact on the climate of the ammonia found in cow feces. We are likely to be seeing more and more of this type of greenwashing, and it is dangerous for many reasons.



Larissa Liebmann is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, where she challenges cruel and environmentally destructive industrial animal agricultural practices, with an emphasis on the federal government’s subsidization of industrial animal agriculture through loans, lax regulation, or approving new animal drugs that perpetuate extreme confinement. Prior to joining the Animal Legal Defense Fund, she worked for Waterkeeper Alliance, combating the powerful fossil fuel industry, focusing on the destructive impacts that fossil fuels have on water resources.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP100/

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).

Civil rights attorney Matthew Strugar joins me this week to talk about a case in Washington DC involving the rights of animal rights activists protesting the sale of foie gras at two prominent restaurants in that city. Our conversation will involve the controversial use of anti-stalking laws to limit protests as well as the successful use of DC’s anti-SLAPP law to defend the right to protest. Both of these statutes, or ones similar to them, can be found in jurisdictions all over the country, and this is therefore an important topic for anyone interested in the right to protest, as well as, more specifically, anyone interested in the welfare of the ducks and geese who suffer in the production of this gruesome so-called delicacy.



Matthew Strugar has been vegan since 1996 and a protest lawyer since 2004. He worked at the Center for Constitutional Rights and the PETA Foundation before starting his own firm in Los Angeles in 2016 which specializes in civil rights, prisoners’ rights, police misconduct, and protester defense, while maintaining animal law as an as important aspect of the practice.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP99/

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, we have something a bit different. I will be talking with Kristina Bergsten, who is the owner and founder of The Animal Law Firm, a Colorado law firm with a multi-state practice. For those of you who are graduating from Law School, or just looking to change your career and wondering whether you can make a living doing animal law, Kristina is here to tell you the answer is a resounding yes. Her firm specializes primarily in companion animal issues which, of course, are important and often underserved in and of themselves, but also, in Kristina’s eyes, are part of the process of waking people, and the legal system, up to the idea that animals matter and the people who care about them matter too. This was a fascinating conversation and I’m sure it will be inspiring to many of you.



Kristina Bergsten is the owner and founder of The Animal Law Firm, a Colorado law firm with a multi state practice. She started practicing animal law in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania before moving to Colorado and, eventually, founding the firm, which specializes in matters such as dog bite defense, suing police departments when cops shoot dogs, pet custody, veterinary malpractice, and others. She will be joining me, right after this.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP98/

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 of the podcast, I will be talking, once again, with Katherine Meyer, who is the Director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law and Policy Clinic, about a recent decision in a case handled by the clinic entitled New England Anti Vivisection Society (now known as Rise for Animals v Elizabeth Goldentyre). This case involves the provision of the Animal Welfare Act that requires, or pretends to require, psychological enrichment for primates who are covered by the Act, such as those languishing in laboratories. This is an interesting area of law, but this interview goes from interesting to basically unbelievable as we hear the story of how, under Professor Meyer’s guidance, students at the clinic did some digging and managed to uncover shocking conduct by the Animal Plant and Health Inspection Service (APHIS), the department within the United States Department of Agriculture that administers the Act. We will also discuss the enormous value of clinical education for law students.



Katherine Meyer is the Director of Harvard Law School’s Animal Law & Policy Clinic, where she teaches students how to become advocates for animals in captivity and the wild. Prior to joining Harvard Law School, for 26 years she was a partner in the public interest law firm Meyer & Glitzenstein, described by the Washingtonian Magazine as “the most effective public interest law firm in Washington, D.C.” She has extensive federal and state court litigation experience in a variety of public interest fields, including Animal, Environmental, Administrative, Public Health, Consumer Protection, and Open Government law.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP97/

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).

If you are pleased that California’s Prop 12 (which, in a small but important way, limits the amount of suffering that can be imposed on mother pigs) survived in the Supreme Court, but you are still unclear as to exactly why and exactly who voted for what, you have come to the right place. Today I will be talking, once again, with Professor Michael Dorf, and we will be unpacking the Court’s recent decision in National Pork Producers v Ross, where the court, by a very fractured majority, upheld Prop 12. If you have listened to Professor Dorf’s prior interview on the case, you already know that he is very capable of making seemingly incomprehensible topics, such as the dormant commerce clause, much more comprehensible than you thought possible. I think you will find that that is what he does here, and we will also discuss whether this case is, in fact, a big deal for animals.



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/ALP96/

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, once again, to Vanessa Shakib of California law firm, Advancing Law for Animals. Vanessa is representing E.L., who, though you don’t know her by name, you have definitely heard about. She is the young girl whose beloved goat, Cedar, who started out as a 4H project, was brutally killed against E.L.’s wishes in what is perhaps the most outrageous behavior by law enforcement regarding an animal that we have seen in a long while. And that’s saying something. While, of course, this case, entitled E.L. v Fernandez, is in early stages, I really wanted to touch base with Vanessa to get up to speed on what really happened here and what we need to be aware of in keeping an eye on this very important, potentially groundbreaking litigation.



Vanessa Shakib is an expert in animal law, government accountability, and illegal business practices. Her work has been featured by CNN, Fox News, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, the Guardian, Science Magazine, and more. Vanessa co-founded and co-directs Advancing Law for Animals, a non-profit law firm for our non-human friends. There, she develops impact litigation to further the interests of animals exploited in research and industrial food production. Vanessa is an Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School, and was awarded 2022-2023 SBA Adjunct Professor of the Year. She regularly presents talks as an invited expert in animal law both nationally and abroad. Prior to animal law, Vanessa specialized in illegal taxation, consumer protection, and inverse condemnation, among other practice areas. Her track record in government oversight informs her work at Advancing Law for Animals, where she has successfully challenged cruel and illegally-promulgated regulations at the federal level, and lack of animal-welfare enforcement at the local level. Vanessa continues to consult on a variety of legal matters through her private practice, Shakib Law, PC.




View the full episode with resources here: https://ourhenhouse.org/ALP95/

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).