LEAP Celebrates Five Years at Yale Law School with Vision for the Future

This fall marks the fifth anniversary of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School (LEAP), an initiative that was founded to elevate the standing of nonhuman animals both within the teaching and research activities of the University and in the world around us.

Looking forward, LEAP’s leaders aim to build upon and expand the program’s successes, imagining an enhanced program that situates all animals — human and nonhuman alike — within the environments on which they depend. Toward that end, LEAP announced that its name will be ever-so-slightly changed to become the Law, Environment, and Animals Program at Yale Law School. The program’s acronym will remain the same, as will the center’s conviction that humanity’s relationship with nonhuman animals is fundamentally a matter of ethics with a capital ‘E.’

LEAP was established at Yale Law School in 2019 through generous founding gifts as a multidisciplinary think-and-do tank dedicated to empowering scholars and students to produce positive legal and political change for animals, people, and the environment. Since that time, LEAP has grown into one of the world’s premier academic programs focused on drawing attention to, and developing strategies to advance, protections for animals and our planet. The program has a strong focus on the climate, animal welfare, and environmental impacts of animal agriculture and other industrial activities impacting animals and ecosystems at large scales.

“Over the last five years, we’ve seen firsthand the value of leveraging the talent, expertise, convening power, and resources of Yale University students and faculty to help protect animals and our shared planet,” said LEAP Faculty Director Doug Kysar, Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law.

As Kysar explained, it is a critical moment for animals. Industrial farming helps to drive the climate crisis and is causing the most widespread animal abuse in human history. Wildlife is undergoing catastrophic loss in both diversity and abundance. Zoonotic disease threats resulting from humanity’s use of animals pose serious risk of future pandemics. At the same time, humanity continues to discover how remarkable animals and ecosystems are — beyond even our wildest imaginations — at the very moment those entities live on the precipice of peril. LEAP was designed to empower Yale students and faculty to respond to these urgent challenges with thoughtfulness, creativity, and action. The program has experienced overwhelming student and faculty engagement since its founding and there is no limit to the important ways in which the Yale community and the world beyond can be engaged going forward.

“Empowered by generous donors, LEAP transformed over the past five years from a dream into a groundbreaking and robust program at a keystone institution,” LEAP Executive Director Viveca Morris said. “The great success of LEAP’s first five years has left us excited and well prepared to carry our work forward in the years to come.”

Since launching in 2019, LEAP has led a diverse program of activities that serve students and scholars at Yale, expanding and advancing the fields of animal and environmental law, and inspiring attention to the deep and urgent questions that human-animal relationships raise.

Among the program’s accomplishments, LEAP has:

• Launched the Climate Change & Animal Agriculture Litigation Initiative, a major and ongoing research project focused on exploring the potential for litigation in U.S. courts to help address the climate harms of industrial animal agriculture.
• Expanded the Yale Law School curriculum by offering the first animal law course for full academic credit in the school’s history and by devising new experiential courses like the Climate, Animal, Food and Environment Law and Policy Lab, a unique curricular offering in which students worked with outside partners to develop novel litigation and legislative strategies to compel industrial food producers to pay currently externalized costs of industrial animal agriculture.
• Created a LEAP Student Fellows program — including 129 Yale graduate and professional school students since 2019 — and an annual LEAP Student Grants Program to support the academic and professional goals of exceptional Yale students working to protect animals and the planet.
• Launched the Yale Bird-Friendly Building Initiative, a novel effort in partnership with the Yale Peabody Museum, the Yale Sustainability Office, and American Bird Conservancy aimed at accelerating the development and adoption of bird-safe building design and materials on Yale’s campus and beyond.
• Convened multiple major workshops with leading practitioners and academics designed to accelerate progress on specific and pressing problems related to industrial animal food production.
  Produced over 50 episodes of the “When We Talk About Animals” podcast featuring in-depth interviews with leading experts whose work has furthered human understanding of what animals think and feel or challenged how our society commonly considers and treats other creatures.
• Hosted a multitude of public events that have brought over 40 leading thinkers — including lawmakers, scholars, artists, scientists, advocates, and journalists — to Yale’s campus to inspire, enrich, and inform broader audiences about animal and environmental protection issues.
• Conducted and supported substantial faculty and student scholarship on topics such as the importance of legally enforceable duties of climate care, emerging litigation strategies for meat and dairy’s climate impacts, agribusiness-funded ‘merchants of doubt,' ecological threats posed by the rapid expansion of marine aquaculture, local policy approaches to wild animal welfare, the significance of legal recognition for animal collectives, the feasibility of establishing wildlife trusts, and more.

“The LEAP program allowed me to begin precisely the sort of novel, challenging, and hands-on legal work I want to do for a career in my 1L spring,” said LEAP Student Fellow Taylor Wurtz ’25. “I came to Yale Law School eager to develop climate change litigation theories but totally ignorant about just how big a share of global greenhouse gas emissions came from industrial animal agriculture. Joining [LEAP] both opened my eyes to the destructive climate effects of animal agriculture and let me dive headfirst into the impactful legal advocacy work I find most exciting just months after starting law school.”

Many of LEAP’s graduates have gone on to advance animal and environmental protection in their careers, earning positions as tenure-track university professors, elected officials, state and federal attorneys general, judicial clerks, public interest and private bar attorneys, counsel in the U.S. House of Representatives, company founders, and nonprofit organization attorneys and leaders.

Lingxi Chenyang ’20, a member of the first class of LEAP Student Fellows, is an associate professor at University of Utah College of Law, where her scholarship focuses on the intersection of property law, climate law, and food and environmental law.

“I am deeply appreciative of LEAP for creating a space at Yale Law School focused on animals, food, and the environment,” Chenyang said. “LEAP elevates the many injustices imposed by the food system on the living world, which are too often overlooked in law and academia. LEAP also gave me and other Yale students the rare opportunity to engage with each other and national leaders on these issues at a critical point in our educational journeys. My experiences as student fellow in LEAP have been invaluable for my ongoing research and advocacy on these issues as a junior law professor.”

LEAP alum Manny Rutinel ’22, now serves as a state representative for Colorado House District 32, where he has sponsored multiple bills aimed at protecting the environment and animal welfare, including a law to advance environmental justice by reducing cumulative impacts of air pollution by increasing oversight of known polluters, a law to phase out PFAS in more products, and a law to improve emergency management plans in Colorado to address the needs of individuals with animals during emergencies. 

“LEAP was instrumental in shaping my legal career and fueling my passion for environmental and animal protection,” Rutinel said. “The program’s interdisciplinary approach, bringing together students from law, environmental studies, business, and beyond, created a rich environment for learning and collaboration. This diversity is essential for tackling global challenges like climate change, environmental justice, labor exploitation, and animal welfare. LEAP not only provided the education and resources but also fostered a network of advocates who were passionate about making real change. I couldn't be more excited to see LEAP continue empowering students to drive impact across disciplines and throughout their careers.”

Brooke Dekolf ’21, another member of LEAP’s inaugural Student Fellow class, currently clerks for Judge Robin Meriweather in the Court of Federal Claims. Prior to clerking, she worked as an Animal Welfare Fellow at Richman Law & Policy, where she practiced consumer protection law, false advertising law, and complex civil litigation challenging “humanewashing” claims made by the animal agriculture industry, with an emphasis on accountability in aquaculture systems and fish welfare.

“If not for LEAP, I would have never known I could spend my legal career litigating on behalf of fishes,” Dekolf said. “As those of us who litigate on behalf of animals, and particularly farmed animals, know: many of the traditional avenues for this type of advocacy have been foreclosed, often in the face of immense industry pressure. LEAP has worked to foster a community of thinkers and doers designed to develop exactly the kind of creative legal thinking that is integral to combating the harms of industrial animal agriculture.”

As LEAP enters the next chapter in its history, the program is especially delighted to announce that Daina Bray, a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School and the program manager of LEAP’s Climate Change and Animal Agriculture Litigation Initiative since 2021, will now serve as the Legal Director of LEAP. For the past three years, Bray has overseen robust collaborations amongst faculty, students, and outside experts focused on advancing strategies to address the outsized emissions of industrial animal agriculture — an area of focus that LEAP continues to prioritize and advance.

“I’m so pleased to have the opportunity to continue to contribute to LEAP’s timely and creative work on legal tools to address the climate harms of animal agriculture,” Bray said. “The energy amongst Yale students to engage with the harms of industrial animal agriculture and to work toward a more sustainable, equitable, and humane food system is inspiring — I’m glad that LEAP is here to meet and nurture that interest.”

LEAP’s work is also advanced by team members Laurie Sellars, Caroline Zhang, and, most recently, Laura Fox, an experienced attorney who joined LEAP in fall 2024 with expertise litigating cases to improve the treatment of farmed animals and to challenge factory farms’ social and environmental harms.

After five years as a co-founder and co-faculty director of LEAP, Jonathan Lovvorn is stepping back from LEAP in order to focus on bringing lawsuits to hold bad actors accountable in court for their harms to animals. As Chief Counsel for Animal Protection Litigation for the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Lovvorn leads one of the most important animal advocacy legal teams in the world. As just one example of the kind of impact Lovvorn and his colleagues at HSUS have, in 2023 the livestock industry challenged the legality of California’s Proposition 12, one of the most effective cage-free laws in the country. The lawsuit eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Lovvorn led the HSUS team’s successful legal defense, helping to secure the only victory for an animal protection law ever before the Court. Once fully implemented, the law is expected to ensure that 1 million pigs, 40 million hens, and tens of thousands of calves will be free of cages each year.

“Jon is undoubtedly one of the most talented and influential animal law experts in the country, and animals are very fortunate to have him in their corner,” Kysar said. “We are grateful for all of the vision and support he has given to LEAP these past five years.”

As a highly interdisciplinary program, LEAP collaborates frequently with other centers and programs at Yale, with scholars and institutions at other universities focused on environmental and animal protection, and with a wide range of external partners, including major animal and environmental protection organizations.

Peter Lehner, Managing Attorney of Earthjustice’s Sustainable Food and Farming Program, congratulated LEAP on five years.

“The Earthjustice Sustainable Food & Farming team is deeply grateful for our collaboration with LEAP,” Lehner said. “The very talented students have researched a wide range of legal and factual matters for us, allowing us to move projects forward far more quickly and confidently. So our projects get the help of the brain and brawn of YLS.”

“No other law school program combines LEAP’s deep subject matter and legal expertise with an interdisciplinary approach to tackling the huge challenges of industrial animal agriculture and the climate crisis,” said Kelsey Eberly, Senior Staff Attorney with FarmSTAND. “It’s a pleasure to work with them and have talented and experienced attorneys and scholars supervising students in providing cutting-edge research and analysis. LEAP fosters collaboration, raises the public profile of the issues, and incubates legal innovations. I look forward to working hand-in-hand with them for years to come.”

LEAP’s work and research have received attention from major publications, including The Washington Post, Vox, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, Inside Climate News, and more.

Learn more about LEAP on the program’s website and sign up for the LEAP email newsletter.