LEAP Student Fellow Maggie Wang ’25 Named Emerging Scholar Fellow by Brooks Institute
The Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School (LEAP) congratulates Yale Law School student and LEAP Student Fellow Maggie Wang ’25 on being named one of the 2023-2024 Emerging Scholar Fellows with the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy. The Brooks Institute’s Emerging Scholars fellowship program supports students who intend to pursue a career in law teaching and who intend to make animal law a significant component of their teaching and research by providing them with mentorship and support in their second or third years of law school.
Wang is a current 2L interested in the use and regulation of animal bodies, especially in contexts of social and ecological uncertainty. Her work engages a wide range of evidence —from medieval animal prosecutions to modern pharmaceutical research, and everything in between — to ask how human legal systems conceive of the overlaps between human and non-human civilizations. With an academic background in history, a creative background in poetry, and a longstanding fascination for the natural sciences, she is committed to employing empirical methods while challenging disciplinary, spatial, and temporal boundaries.
“I am thrilled to be selected as a Brooks Institute Emerging Scholars Fellow for the 2023-24 academic year, and I look forward to developing my research and career interests through this unique opportunity,” Wang said.
One academic research project Wang is pursuing with support of the Brooks Fellowship uses conceptual frameworks from corporate law as well as evidence from medieval animal prosecutions to argue that animal collectives — for example, colonies of insects, flocks of birds, and packs of mammals — deserve and need legal recognition distinct from any recognition accorded to species or individual animals.
“Maggie’s project on animal collectives is exactly the kind of highly creative, theoretically rich, and empirically grounded scholarship that will really advance animal law as a field,” LEAP Faculty Co-Director and Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law Douglas Kysar said. “We’ve been fortunate at YLS to have a string of Brooks Fellowship recipients in recent years and Maggie will now carry that banner with great distinction.”
Founded in 2019, the Law, Ethics & Animals Program at Yale Law School is a multidisciplinary program dedicated to developing strategies to address industrialized animal cruelty and its impacts on the living world, and to drawing attention to the deep questions of conscience and law raised by humanity’s treatment of animals.
