Program on Sustainability and Food and Animal Law

The Program on Sustainability and Food and Animal Law serves students interested in issues of food and animal law, including facilitating clinical opportunities in these fields. The Program is also designed to be a focal point for scholarly and policy-related discourse and research. An annual workshop or conference will be held at the Law School, beginning in the summer of 2021. Inquiries about the program are very welcome, and can be directed to Professor David Dana.

Spring 2024

Animal Welfare and Climate Change: Intersections and Parallels Symposium

March 2024

View the symposium agenda and register


Spring 2023

Speaker Series

All talks are held from 10:25-11:25 am and available on Zoom. Please email d-dana@law.northwestern.edu for the links.

January 27
Maneesha Deckha, Professor, University of Victoria, Animals As Beings

February 17
Lee Miller, Lecturing fellow, Duke Law School, Regulating CAFOs 

February 24
Wayne Hsuing, The Sanctuary Initiative 

April 7
Jill Eisen, Asst. Professor, U. Alberta, Animals in Comparative Constitutional Law 


Spring 2022

Speaker Series

All lectures held from 1:30-2:30 pm.

February 3
Professor Maneesha Deckha, University of Victoria 

March 18
Professor Alejandro Camacho, University of California-Irvine 

March 31
Professor Karen Bradshaw, Arizona State University 

Fall 2022

Animal Law Conference: Property in Wildlife

October 2022

The second annual conference sponsored by the Program will focus on whether property ownership in wildlife is conceptually tenable and helpful or unhelpful in terms of goals of conservation, preservation, and protection of animal welfare.


Spring 2021

Speaker Series

All lectures held from 4-5 pm.

February 17
Lee Miller
is a lecturing fellow at Duke Law School and Policy Director at the agricultural-reform NGO Acre Policy.

February 24
Jay Shooster is Of Counsel at the Richman Law Group, a public-interest law firm. Jay is litigating a range of cases alleging deceptive labelling and advertising on the part of major food companies, including Tyson, Hormel Foods, and Unilever.

March 10
Justin Marceau is Professor of Law at Sturm Law School at the University of Denver.  His first book, Beyond Cages was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019.  Justin is currently working on two additional books, a monograph examining the socio-legal history of undercover investigations (co-authored with Alan Chen), and an edited volume on animal law and social justice issues (with Lori Gruen).  He visited at Harvard Law School in 2019, and is currently a Visiting Professor at UC-Irvine.

March 24
Robin Craig
is the James I. Farr Presidential Endowed Chair of Law, University of Utah, and beginning in the spring of 2021, will join the faculty at USC.  Robin is the author, co- author, or editor of 11 books, most recently The End of Sustainability (Kansas University Press 2017, with Melinda Harm Benson).

Summer 2021

Empirical Animal Law Conference

July 2021

The first annual conference sponsored by the Program will focus on the empirical dimension of animal law, highlighting recent empirical research by legal scholars (both quantitative and qualitative) and convening discussions regarding possible future research projects and collaborations.