NY State Bar Association Student Writing Competition

David Cassuto

Attention Law Students!

From the email:

2016 NEW YORK STATE BAR ASSOCIATION

COMMITTEE ON ANIMALS AND THE LAW

STUDENT WRITING COMPETITION

The Committee on Animals and the Law of the New York State Bar Association is very pleased to announce the Eighth Annual Student Writing Competition. The deadline for submission is July 1, 2016.

The Committee on Animals and the Law was established to provide information resources for the New York State Bar Association’s members and the public about non-human, animal‑related humane issues, which arise from and have an effect upon our legal system. This competition seeks to foster legal scholarship among law students in the area of animals and the law. This competition provides law students with an incentive and opportunity to learn more about this area of law.

Don’t Be Cruel (Anymore): A Look at the Animal Cruelty Regimes of the United States and Brazil with a Call for a New Animal Welfare Agency

David Cassuto

The shameless self-promotion desk is back and shilling a new article.  The title is as above and you can find the full text here.  Worth noting is that it appears in the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review and that both articles in the current issue of one of the country’s leading environmental law journals are on animal law.  Big plaudits to the journal.  Get it, read it, tell your friends.

Abstract:

In the United States and around the world, animals exploited for human use suffer cruel and needless harm. The group bearing the brunt of this exploitation—agricultural animals—is routinely exempted from the largely ineffective and rarely enforced animal welfare and anti-cruelty regulations that exist today. This Article offers a comparative analysis of the agricultural animal welfare regimes of two countries with globally significant presence in the agriculture industry: the United States and Brazil. Even though the two countries

The AWA at 50 — Call for Papers

David Cassuto

From the email: 

The Animal Welfare Act at Fifty Conference

 

Harvard Law School
1585 Massachusetts Ave – Cambridge

Date/Time
Date(s) – Thursday, September 22, 2016 – Sunday, September 25, 2016
All Day

Location
Harvard Law School

Overview

The Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School is pleased to announce The Animal Welfare Act at Fifty, a conference that will bring experts together to assess the first fifty years of the Animal Welfare Act (AWA) and consider recommendations for the future. The event will include conference presentations as well as a separate academic workshop component.

We welcome submissions on both broad and specific law and policy issues. In an effort to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue, we encourage submissions from legal scholars and lawyers; government officials and staff; academics in disciplines outside of law, such as sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics; international scholars and regulators; veterinarians and animal behaviorists; and others with perspectives on the AWA. We also encourage submissions from experts in other areas of legislation and regulation who can bring a comparative approach to the study of the AWA. We encourage submissions from advocacy organizations, industry representatives, think tanks, and others outside academia, but emphasize that this is a scholarly conference and abstracts will be judged by academic standards.

Individuals can submit proposals for both conference presentations and the workshop if desired.

Conference Presentations

Those interested in presenting at the conference are invited to submit an abstract of up to 400 words describing their proposed presentation along with a CV. All abstracts and CVs should be submitted together to ALPP@law.harvard.edu with “AWA Conference Presentation Proposal” in the subject line no later than April 5, 2016. Conference presentations will be approximately 20 minutes in length.

Workshop Papers

Those interested in participating in the academic workshop are invited to submit an abstract of up to 400 words describing their proposed paper along with a CV. All abstracts and CVs should be submitted together to ALPP@law.harvard.edu with “AWA Workshop Proposal” in the subject line no later than April 5, 2016.

Those selected as workshop participants must submit their final papers by August 15, 2016, so that they can be circulated and read by the other workshop participants in advance of the workshop. The final workshop papers should be approximately 10,000 words (including footnotes). Each paper should be an unpublished work in progress. We will consider papers that have been accepted for publication, as long as they have not yet been published and the author will still have an opportunity to incorporate feedback from the workshop.

Potential Topics

We welcome submissions on both broad and specific law and policy issues. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Agency compliance strategies

Efficacy of different types of standards, such as engineering vs. performance, general vs. species-specific, etc.

Which categories of animals are/should be afforded legal protections

Agency licensing practices

Agency restructuring proposals

Agency culture

Differential treatment of research facilities and other regulated entities

Education vs. enforcement

Regulatory vs non-regulatory approaches

AWA intersections with other laws

Agency inspections

Agency administrative hearing practices and due process

Agency collaboration with the Department of Justice

Settlements and discounting administrative penalties

Agency use of warnings

Assessing the adequacy of veterinary care

Judicial review of agency action

Citizen suit provision proposals

Impact of public opinion on the law and its implementation, media narratives, and social movement advocacy

Animal confiscation under the AWA

Transparency in implementation

Alternatives to use of animals in research

The role and efficacy of Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees

The role of undercover investigations at regulated facilities

Comparative analyses of the AWA and other animal protection regimes

Contact

For additional information, please contact alpp@law.harvard.edu.

 

A survey of animal law; are animals ‘things’?

Kathleen Stachowski   Other Nations

“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.”
~Abraham Lincoln

Two items of possible interest to readers of this blog:

• “Are animals ‘things’? The law evolves.” ~Harvard Magazine

Excerpt: “As the role of animals in society and the economy has evolved, and more recently, as scientific research has revealed more about animals’ cognitive abilities and social development, public sensibility has changed dramatically, often leaving outmoded law behind. As a result, lawyers worldwide have begun searching for innovative ways to make animals more visible to the law: strengthening and enacting new anti-cruelty statutes, improving basic protections, and, in some more radical cases, challenging animals’ property status itself in an effort to grant them fundamental rights.” 

Channel your inner wolverine!

Click image for details

Kathleen Stachowski
Other Nations

Happy Wolverine Birthday! According to the Wolverine Foundation, February 14th is the day designated to symbolically mark the birth of wolverine kits. They come into the world under five inches long, weighing 3.5-5.11 ounces, and covered in white fur. They sometimes hang with one or the other parent for up to two years before going their own scrappy way.

Just a few days ago, on Feb. 9th, Gulo gulo’s lawyers were in a Missoula, Montana courtroom where a U.S. District judge heard arguments pertaining to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s denial of Endangered Species Act protection for wolverines–specifically examining whether the decision was reasonable…or arbitrary (article).  

Publishing Opportunity: Brazilian Animal Law Journal

David Cassuto

From the email:

Brazilian Animal Law Journal

Call for submissions/2016

 The Brazilian Animal Law Journal, ISSN 2317-4552, is a quarterly, peer-reviewed law journal, available on https://www.animallaw.info/policy/revista-brasileira-de-direito-animal-brazilian-animal-rights-review and http://www.portalseer.ufba.br/index.php/RBDA .