Courses

The Law, Environment & Animals Practicum’s mission is to train students to produce positive legal change for animals, people, and the environment on which we depend. Through real-world projects with outside partners, we will explore legal strategies to reform our relationship with animals and the natural world. 

We live in a pivotal moment for non-human animals and their environments. Industrial animal farming is causing the most systemic and large-scale animal suffering in human history while also destabilizing our planet through gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions and other harmful impacts. Wildlife is quickly disappearing in what has been called Earth’s sixth great extinction event, at the same time that new discoveries about what animals think and feel are overturning past beliefs about human exceptionalism. Nonetheless, as our powers over animals and the planet have been amplified exponentially by industry and technology, our laws regarding animal and environmental protection remain outdated, insufficient, or non-existent. 

The Practicum’s seminar component will explore industrial-scale abuses of animals and ecosystems, the current legal frameworks that allow such exploitation, and responsive legal advocacy. During the 2026-2027 school year, the Practicum’s project work will focus on the potential to use legal strategies—both litigation and policy—to address the climate harms of animal agriculture.

The Goldman Sonnenfeldt Environmental Protection Clinic’s mission is to train students in environmental advocacy through interdisciplinary project work in collaboration with public interest organizations. Students are assigned to teams of two-to-four members drawn from the Law School and the School of the Environment to work on discrete projects in collaboration with partner organizations. The clinic’s docket covers a wide range of environmental issues, with most projects integrating legal and policy components. In addition to covering current topics in environmental policy and principles of environmental justice, clinic seminars help students master the tools of effective environmental advocacy, including the ability to research law and science, write persuasively, and manage projects cooperatively. For the 2024-2025 academic year, the EPC will also include teaching team members and projects from the Climate, Animals, Food, and Environmental Law and Policy (CAFE) Lab. Projects offered through CAFE Lab in the past have included litigation to address GHG emissions from industrial agriculture and legislative models to hold industrial food producers accountable for the currently uncounted, externalized costs of industrial agriculture for animals, workers, communities, and the environment.

The Advanced Climate, Animal, Food, and Environmental Law and Policy Lab allows students who have already completed the CAFE Lab course to continue working on projects that advance industrial animal agriculture reform. Enrollment limited. Permission of instructors required.

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.

This course will examine the application of the law to non-human animals, the rules and regulations that govern their treatment, and the concepts of "animal welfare" and "animal rights." The course will explore the historical and philosophical treatment of animals, discuss how such treatment impacts the way judges, politicians, lawyers, legal scholars and lay people see, speak about, and use animals; survey current animal protection laws and regulations, including overlap with such policy issues as food and agriculture, climate change, and biodiversity protection; describe recent political and legal campaigns to reform animal protection laws; examine the concept of "standing" and the problems of litigating on behalf of animals; discuss the current classification of animals as "property" and the impacts of that classification, and debate the merits and limitations of alternative classifications, such as the recognition of "legal rights" for animals. Students will write a series of short response papers. An option to produce a longer research paper for Substantial or Supervised Analytic Writing credit will be available.

This course will examine the relationship between climate change, humans, and animals. With few exceptions, researchers and policy advocates looking at the impact of climate change on animals tend to focus on species loss and biodiversity at a macro level. But climate change is also having profound impacts on the individual lives and well-being of billions of animals. Large-scale human use of animals for food is also a significant and often overlooked cause of climate change emissions. The course seeks to develop a deeper understanding of the impacts of climate change on animals, the power dynamic between privileged human actors and the disenfranchised victims of climate change, and the intersection of animal welfare, environmentalism, food policy, and climate change. The course will be organized partly as a traditional seminar and partly as a collective research endeavor to gather and analyze information on this significant and neglected topic. As part of the course experience, students will work in small groups to conduct research and write a report on an underdeveloped topic concerning animals and climate change. The various sub-reports will be edited into a single white paper that will be distributed to the animal welfare, environmental, food policy, and climate change advocacy communities. Depending on the scope of their work, YLS students may be eligible to receive Substantial Paper or Supervised Analytical Writing credit. Paper required. Enrollment limited. Permission of the instructors required. Also F&ES.