From 2019 to 2024, LEAP led the Climate, Animal, Food, and Environmental Law & Policy Lab (CAFE Lab) at Yale Law School, an innovative course focused on developing novel litigation and legislative strategies to compel industrial food producers to pay the currently uncounted, externalized costs of industrial agriculture for people, animals, and the environment. Students enrolled in the Lab gained firsthand experience working with faculty, outside experts, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to develop innovative law and policy initiatives to address patterns of exploitations that affect multiple social causes, including animal welfare, worker and immigrant rights, environmental protection, consumer safety, rural communities, fair and competitive markets, and public health.
The CAFE Lab’s Animal Agriculture Accountability Project collaborated with a diverse set of NGOs in the climate, animal welfare, labor, food policy, and related social justice movements on the development and enactment of state and local legal policy interventions to hold industrial animal agriculture accountable for the systemic harms the industry inflicts on people, animals, and the environment. You can read reports developed in previous CAFE Lab sessions on LEAP’s Publications and Talks page.