LEAP Announces Fall 2024 Speaker Series

The Law, Ethics & Animals Program (LEAP) at Yale Law School has announced the program’s Fall 2024 Speaker Series. The series begins on Thursday, Oct. 10 with a talk by Professor Maneesha Deckha, who will discuss the inequitable nature of animal experimentation and its unresponsiveness to structural determinants of health. Other events this fall will examine scientific attribution and legal regulation of climate emissions from the food system and the ways in which diverse forms of life created the planet as we know it today. You can read more about and register for all of LEAP’s fall events below. 

Animal Experimentation: An Inequitable Practice Out of Touch with the Structural Determinants of Health? with Maneesha Deckha

Oct. 10 at 12:15 - 1:15 p.m. ET
Location: Sterling Law Building, Room 129
Register (in-person event)
Lunch will be provided

Though still preferred among the scientific community, animal-based research is attracting increased public scrutiny as AI and other animal-free technologies to learn about human health and disease proliferate. A rising cohort of scientists and other scholars and commentary have flagged the inefficiencies of animal-based models given the poor translation of findings to the human context, the unnecessariness of animal research given new technologies to replace them, and the ongoing ethical implications for animals as involuntary and suffering research subjects. In this talk, moderated by LEAP Faculty Co-Director Doug Kysar, University of Victoria Faculty of Law's Professor Maneesha Deckha discusses an additional reason to question the continued preference for animal-based research: its inequitable nature in terms of the humans it might benefit and its unresponsiveness to the core drivers of human health and health inequities at both global and domestic levels, namely, the structural determinants of health. Prominent messaging about the continued need for animal research implies that all humans stand to benefit evenly from it. Professor Deckha argues, however, that a fairer assessment would acknowledge its considerable differentiated impact and role in exacerbating health inequities.

Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria in British Columbia where she directs the Animals & Society Research Initiative. Her research expertise includes critical animal law, vegan ecofeminist theory, and postcolonial theory. Professor Deckha’s work analyzes the gendered, culture, racialized, and species dimensions of law and she has published widely in law reviews, feminist journals, and edited collections. She is author of Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders and director of the open access documentary series, A Deeper Kindness: Youth Activism in Animal Law, available here and on YouTube: @ASRI-UVic. In Spring 2024 she was a Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Zurich and a Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich. Professor Deckha is a graduate of McGill University, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Columbia Law School.

This event is co-sponsored with the Yale Animal Law Society, the Yale Environmental Law Association, and the Yale Sustainable Food Program.

Who Are the Real Climate Polluters in Our Food System? with Matthew Hayek

Oct. 24 at 12:15 - 1:15 p.m. ET
Location: Sterling Law Building, Room 129
Register (in-person event)
Lunch will be provided

Attributing responsibility for greenhouse emissions across complex food systems is not trivial. Foods all have embodied emissions in their lifecycle, but a long supply chain of actors are responsible for producing, distributing, and adding value to these commodities. Additionally, responsibility for emissions is a separate but overlapping concern from who has the responsibility and power to reduce, mitigate, or reverse these climate emissions. In this talk, moderated by LEAP Executive Director Viveca Morris, New York University’s Professor Matthew Hayek will demystify the scientific attribution of climate emissions to commodities in our food system, particularly for animal-sourced foods like meat and dairy, which are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions. He will then discuss the legal responsibilities for environmental harms and their mitigation.

Matthew Hayek is an environmental scientist and Assistant Professor in the New York University Department of Environmental Studies. His scientific research quantifies the environmental impacts of our food system, with a specific focus on greenhouse gas emissions such as methane and land use changes including deforestation. His research uses environmental and statistical analyses to clarify the contributions that food system policies can make toward mitigating emissions in line with national and international climate targets. Dr. Hayek received his Ph.D. in Environmental Science and Engineering from Harvard University, which was followed by a postdoc appointment at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School. He is also an affiliated faculty member in the NYU Center for Data Science and the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program. 

This event is co-sponsored with the Yale Animal Law Society, the Yale Environmental Law Association, and the Yale Sustainable Food Program. 

Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life with Ferris Jabr

Nov. 13 at 12:10 - 1:00 p.m. ET
Location: Sterling Law Building, Room 128
Register (in-person event)
Lunch will be provided

Historically, Western science has largely segregated geology and biology, characterizing Earth as an inanimate rock with some life on its surface and minimizing the role of life in shaping the planet as a whole. Now, something is shifting. Science now recognizes that Earth and life continually coevolve, and experts from diverse fields are increasingly open to the idea that life and the planet form a single, highly interconnected, living system. Over the past several billion years, microbes, plants, fungi, and animals have radically altered the continents, oceans, and atmosphere, transforming what was once a lump of orbiting rock into our cosmic oasis. Life breathed oxygen into the atmosphere, dyed the sky blue, made fire possible, calibrated ocean chemistry, converted barren crust into fertile soil, and perhaps even played a role in the formation of the continents. In this talk, moderated by LEAP Postgraduate Fellow Laurie Sellars, science writer Ferris Jabr, author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life, chronicles the many ways that diverse forms of life, from microbes to mammoths, made the world as we know it today and explores how our species fits into this paradigm.

Ferris Jabr is the author of Becoming Earth: How Our Planet Came to Life and a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and Scientific American. He has also written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, National Geographic, Wired, Outside, Lapham’s Quarterly, McSweeney’s, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. His work has been anthologized in several editions of The Best American Science and Nature Writing series and has received the support of a Whiting Foundation Creative Nonfiction Grant, as well as fellowships from UC Berkeley and MIT. He has an MA in journalism from New York University and a Bachelor of Science from Tufts University. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his partner, Ryan, their dog, Jack, and more plants than they can count.

This event is co-sponsored with the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale, the Yale Animal Law Society, the Yale Environmental Law Association, and the Yale Journalism Initiative.