Q&A: LEAP Student Fellow Ethan Shopmeyer ’26 Discusses Animal Law Reading Group

Ethan Shopmeyer ’26 is a 3L law student, a student fellow with the Law, Environment & Animals Program (LEAP) at Yale Law School, and co-president of the Yale Animal Law Society. This year, he organized the animal law reading group, a for-credit course at Yale Law School in which students explore the doctrine of existing domestic and international animal law and the theories of change underlying different approaches to nonhuman animal advocacy. The reading group is currently Yale Law School’s only course focusing explicitly on animal law.

Here, Shopmeyer discusses his interest in animal law and his experience designing and facilitating the reading group.

How did you first become interested in animal law?

I’ve always had a fascination with the natural world, and I spent much of my formative years poring over animal encyclopedias, volunteering at my local zoo, and honing my amateur beekeeping skills on my family’s hive. However, it wasn’t until I began studying philosophy as an undergraduate student that I was truly exposed to animal rights discourse for the first time, and I remember feeling convicted at how much my unexamined anthropocentrism was informing my worldview and lifestyle. Fortunately, animal rights frameworks offered me a language for confronting and deconstructing these assumptions I had carried with me, and I began to shift both my research focuses and life choices to reflect these new commitments. When my parallel long-running interest in law began to materialize as a plan to actually attend law school, I began to think about how to merge these disparate threads, a process which culminated in a senior thesis applying feminist critiques of American legal institutions to nonhuman animals.

At Yale, I’ve had the privilege to further explore these interests in a few different settings. In my five semesters with the former Climate, Animal, Food, and Environmental Law & Policy Lab and the Environmental Protection Clinic, I have gotten to work on a range of projects related to farmed animal welfare, including the Animal Agriculture Accountability Project previously featured in this Q&A series! During my summers, I have had the pleasure of interning with both Animal Outlook and Humane World for Animals, two excellent organizations within the animal rights movement that do a lot of great work for nonhuman animals. And finally, in my capacities as LEAP Student Fellow, co-President of the Animal Law Society and Environmental Law Association, and now leader of the Animal Law reading group, I have been fortunate to have met many students also interested in these issues and have striven to help bolster the animal community here on campus.

Could you talk about the process of creating this reading group? What inspired you to take on this project, and how has it come together?

During my 1L year, I participated in a similar animal law reading group led by former LEAP Student Fellow Stuart Babcock ’24. That semester gave me a solid foundation for the rest of the animal-related work I would do in clinics and internships throughout the rest of my time in law school, so when a number of incoming students joined the Animal Law Society last fall, I wanted to try to give them the same sort of forum for learning about and discussing these issues. Unfortunately, the Law School has not offered a fully-fledged animal law class in some time, which I believe only further heightens the need for and importance of creating these kinds of spaces for student dialogue.

Once I had determined there would be adequate demand to make the group feasible, I set about putting together a syllabus to structure the course. In this respect, I was fortunate to be able to draw on a number of resources from students and faculty at both Yale and other law schools, and multiple experts within the animal rights movement kindly offered their time to come join our sessions as guest speakers. In the end, we ended up with 10 students enrolled full-time in the course, with a few other students occasionally dropping into our discussions as their schedule permits; it’s been very rewarding to see such an appetite for animal law among students despite the limited offerings!

Animal law intersects and overlaps with many other areas of law. How did you choose topics and readings for this course?  

Given that reading groups typically meet only once per week, figuring out how to fit all of the topics I wanted to cover into just around a dozen class meetings was one of the most difficult aspects of putting a syllabus together. In an ideal world, we would spend multiple meetings exploring any one of the subjects we’re covering this semester, so I made an effort to strike a balance between breadth and depth in terms of our readings.

Additionally, since this may be the only opportunity our students get to take a course focused on animals while at Yale, I wanted to make sure the course incorporated both the doctrinal contours of existing animal law as well as the theories of change underlying different approaches to nonhuman animal advocacy. To this end, most of our sessions have consisted of one or two legal opinions from cases relevant to our topic for that week, as well as an additional non-legal source such as academic articles or compiled reports. My hope is that students will come away from the course with exposure to both some of the seminal animal law rulings on the books as well as external perspectives that can contextualize and add greater nuance to those decisions.

At this point in the semester, we’ve just wrapped up our unit examining the state of animal welfare laws in the United States and are now broadening our perspective to look at international frameworks. Looking ahead, we have a few sessions dedicated to exploring the overlap between animal law and adjacent legal spheres and movements, such as environmentalism, indigenous sovereignty, and other social justice issues. Each of these movements has both much to offer and much to learn from increased dialogue with one another, and I think a space such as this with students from a wide variety of backgrounds and interests presents a great opportunity for that kind of mutual enrichment and cross-pollination to take place in a constructive way.

Is there a reading in the course that you think everyone should read?

One of my favorite sessions thus far has been our week covering the intersection between the Rights of Nature and animal rights movements. Rights of Nature frameworks have been some of the most effective examples of environmental progress in the last 20 years, with multiple nations in South America, Asia, and Oceania enshrining protections for the environment writ large or endowing specific natural features such as rivers or forests with rights as legal subjects. However, despite the transformative potential of these frameworks, this has not always translated to substantive advancement for the rights and interests of individual animals as distinct from Nature.

Though the issue is ultimately too nuanced to fully do justice to it here, there is one recent case that exemplifies the promise of how a more expansive reading of Rights of Nature can accommodate nonhuman animals that I think is worth highlighting. In 2022, the Supreme Constitutional Court of Ecuador issued a landmark ruling explicitly extending the protections of the Ecuadorian constitution’s Rights of Nature provisions to an individual animal for the first time, recognizing Estrellita the woolly monkey as a subject of rights cognizable under the same kinds of legal mechanisms available to humans and other aspects of nature. That reading set the stage for a really interesting discussion among our group, and I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in animal law. Aside from the groundbreaking significance of its practical implications, the language of the opinion offers hope that courts are increasingly receptive to these kinds of arguments, and I think it is particularly important in the context of the animal rights movement to celebrate and draw renewed hope from victories at the symbolic level as well as more tangible legal successes.

What have the sessions been like so far? What has been your favorite part of the reading group?    

I’ve really enjoyed our sessions thus far, not least because of the amount of students who have enrolled in the course and what that indicates about the future for the animal law community at YLS. One of the coolest aspects of the reading group has been the opportunity to be joined by a number of guest speakers from different spheres of the animal rights movement, including professors, attorneys, and researchers from multiple countries! These guests have proven invaluable in terms of bringing in additional perspectives to supplement our weekly readings, and in many cases, the insights they’ve gained from years of practice set the stage for more interesting discussion among the group. In my experience, the animal law movement often punches above its weight, which I believe is in no small part due to the willingness of advocates to freely share their time and real-world experiences with students, and I feel very grateful that so many individuals have been willing to engage with us and give back in this way.

We have been able to learn from each other just as much as from our materials, and it has been rewarding to see students willing to challenge some of their own preconceptions.”

In addition to the time that we spend speaking with guests, the rest of our sessions typically consist of discussions regarding the readings from that week or any additional video materials that we use to further ground our conversation among current events. In this respect, I have appreciated the fact that our students come to the group with a wide variety of backgrounds and perspectives, both in terms of their past engagement with animal law and their experiences prior to and during law school. This diversity has enabled richer discussion, as we have been able to learn from each other just as much as from our materials, and it has been rewarding to see students willing to challenge some of their own preconceptions or broaden their understanding of the complexities of this topic. Even aside from the substantive content of our sessions, I believe it has also been valuable to have a space for likeminded students to come together and maintain a strong community to keep these topics alive at the Law School.

What advice would you give to students looking to get involved in animal law?

Pursuing a career in animal law can be more difficult in some respects than with other areas of law, if only because of how niche the issue remains despite the considerable progress made by the movement in recent years. However, there are a few things that students can do during their time in law school to maximize their prospects down the line, including by pursuing relevant opportunities in clinical contexts or through summer internships, which multiple animal advocacy groups sponsor. I’ve also gotten a lot of value from taking courses outside the law school that are related to animal issues and that provide new avenues and contexts for engaging with the subject. And of course, students at Yale have access to a trove of resources and knowledgeable faculty at LEAP that are more than willing to help mentor and guide students interested in animal law! As described above, many advocates and actors within the animal rights sphere more broadly are happy and willing to engage with students and share opportunities or insights into how to go about breaking into the field as an attorney, so making those connections while still in law school can be a really valuable way of getting acquainted with what sorts of path are available.

To this last point, I would just add that students interested in pursuing animal law should try to remain flexible and open with respect to their options. Ultimately, there are many different paths into and within this space, and while at times it can be discouraging to see animal rights deprioritized or minimized within certain institutional contexts, pursuing justice for and advocating on behalf of those whose voices many would rather ignore entirely is an endeavor in which it is worth persisting.