Q&A: LEAP’s Ann Linder Examines Industrial Animal Agriculture Litigation

Law, Environment & Animals Program (LEAP) Research Scholar Ann Linder leads the Animal Agriculture Accountability Project (AAAP), an academic and non-governmental organization partnership that seeks to accelerate the enactment and enforcement of state and local legal policy interventions to hold industrial animal agriculture accountable for its harms to people, animals, and the environment. In her role, Linder is conducting an in-depth assessment of potential litigation strategies challenging industrial animal agriculture’s animal welfare, labor, environmental, and other negative externalities.

Linder joined LEAP in March 2025 from the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School, where she served as the Associate Director of Policy & Research. While at Harvard, she was the lead author of two groundbreaking, comprehensive reports examining the zoonotic disease risk posed by animal industries in the U.S. and across 15 countries spanning six continents. Her work has been published by Science, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, and Lewis and Clark Law School, and has been featured in The New York Times. Linder currently serves on the Animal Advisory Commission for the City of Austin, which makes recommendations to the Austin City Council on how to improve the welfare of the city’s animals.

Tell us about the Animal Agriculture Accountability Project that you lead at Yale.

The purpose of this project is to look comprehensively at litigation that has sought to address harms caused by industrial animal agriculture — whether those be harms to the environment, to workers’ rights, to animals, to health and food safety, or other areas — in order to better understand and study the field. We wanted to take a 10,000-foot view of the issue and look broadly across a range of different issue areas to get a complete picture of the litigation landscape as a whole, in order to examine what trends and themes might be present in these cases. 

Another aim of this work is to critically examine some of the most common assumptions about which strategies are or are not effective in this area, to see if our research supports those conclusions. While this is an area that has been heavily litigated for decades, to date, no comprehensive assessment has sought to catalog and examine these cases as a whole. The idea here was to go in with an open mind and rigorously explore this field of litigation through both qualitative and quantitative case research.

What have you learned from the Animal Agriculture Accountability Project’s research so far? Have any of the findings been surprising?

As part of this project, we worked with a talented team of students to identify and catalog more than 650 cases that address the issue of industrial animal agriculture. We also conducted a survey of more than 150 practitioners currently working in the space. Along with that, we've undertaken case research and interviews with attorneys who have litigated some of these cases, to try to better understand their experience and the challenges that they face in bringing these cases. While I can't say much about the results of this work at this stage, I can say that, to me, some of the most interesting findings have come from comparing across these different research modalities — trying to identify places where common perceptions from the survey are not supported by our data, for example, or instances where we observe potential findings from the database borne out in practice through conversations with litigators. 

One finding that I can share is that our survey results found that nearly half of our sample of individuals working in this field believed that the kind of litigation they were working on was not the most effective kind of litigation. While there could be a number of different factors driving this result (for example, a mismatch between the types of litigation strategies that donors are most interested in funding and those that attorneys believe are the most effective), it underscores the need for academic research such as this to shape and inform these conversations.

The goal for this work, ultimately, is to create a resource that can be broadly useful to a range of different stakeholders, regardless of what theory of change one might subscribe to or what issue area they're most interested in. While we will draw our own assessments from the information that we collect, our hope is that others can do the same and reach their own conclusions, even if those might be different from ours.

Through your research, you’ve interviewed and spoken with dozens of leading litigators trying to improve the accountability of the animal agriculture industry. What are some of the greatest challenges they face?

Part of the work we're doing for this project includes in-depth interviews with litigators who have brought these cases and engineered these litigation strategies. Through these conversations, we're hoping to understand more about what goes into that process and the types of challenges inherent in bringing lawsuits against large corporate interests. Over the course of these interviews, we have heard from attorneys about the obstacles and bottlenecks that they've had to overcome, and the key issues that they see as holding back progress in the space. Some of those include obvious things like funding or access to pro bono assistance, but others include things like the absence of objective scientific research in certain areas that make it more difficult for them to bring and prove these types of highly technical claims regarding the impact of nitrates on drinking water, for example. Much of the existing research in some of these areas has been funded by the livestock industry itself, making it more difficult to find independent experts and the kinds of objective scientific analysis needed to prove these cases.

In addition to your work at Yale, you currently serve on the Animal Advisory Commission for the city of Austin. How does the commission work to improve the welfare of the city’s animals and what has your experience of being a commission member been like? Have any of the issues you’ve worked on been particularly meaningful to you? 

I have really enjoyed getting the opportunity to represent my community by serving on this commission. So much of the work I have done professionally is related to federal or international policy and feels quite removed in that way, so working on this commission, focused on improving the welfare of animals in my own community, has been a wonderful antidote to that. A large part of our role, as a commission, is to give a voice and a platform to the public to speak about the issues that are important to them and work together with citizens and stakeholders to build better solutions to those problems. For me, this is one of the most valuable things that we do — simply to listen to community members and try to learn from their experiences.

One recent issue that I focused on is glue traps. This was an issue that was brought to us by members of the community who were concerned about the city’s use of these kinds of traps (which are widely considered inhumane and problematic from a public health standpoint, as well). We heard from a bat rescue, other wildlife rehabilitators, and veterinarians about the ways in which these traps have impacted them when non-target species are captured. (The folks at Austin Bat Rescue even showed us a time-lapse video illustrating the hours they spent using Q-tips and Vaseline to try to carefully remove a family of bats that had become caught and ensnared in a glue trap.) Ultimately, our commission was able to pass a recommendation to phase out the use of glue traps in city facilities and replace them with more humane alternatives. We worked with stakeholders and the city manager’s office to carry this forward and end the City’s use of these traps altogether, in favor of better alternatives.

What advice, if any, do you have for current law students — or other graduate and undergraduate students — who are interested in issues related to animal law?

I think my only advice would be to seek out opportunities, reach out to meet people, and try to take as much initiative as you can in shaping your own education. There are plenty of other professions where there is a clear, established track, and all the steps are easily laid out for you. This isn’t one of those fields, though, and if you care about these issues, you might need to be proactive and willing to take risks and try to build your own path forward as you work to turn your passion into a profession. The good news is that the folks who work in this space are wonderful and welcoming and want to help bring students in. Don’t be afraid to reach out and ask questions or try to create opportunities where none currently exist. In a field like this, sometimes you have to be a self-starter, so don’t shy away from that, because the work is worthwhile and the potential to make a difference in this area is enormous.