Pace Environmental Law Review 2015 Symposium: Reconceptualizing the Future of Environmental Law

Pace Environmental Law Review\u27s 2015 Symposium, entitled Reconceptualizing the Future of Environmental Law, can be traced back to over a year ago when a few Pace Environmental Law faculty members approached me and Katie Hatt, the Managing Editor of the law review, with an idea.1 No, not an idea, rather a question. They simply asked us, “what do you think the future holds for environmental law?” This question transformed into an extensive conversation about the past, the present, and the future of environmental law

Don\u27t Be Cruel (Anymore): A Look at the Animal Cruelty Regimes of the United States and Brazil with a Call for a New Animal Welfare Agency

In the United States and around the world, animals exploited for human use suffer cruel and needless harm. The group bearing the brunt of this exploitation— agricultural animals—is routinely exempted from the largely ineffective and rarely enforced animal welfare and anti-cruelty regulations that exist today. This Article offers a comparative analysis of the agricultural animal welfare regimes of two countries with globally significant presence in the agriculture industry: the United States and Brazil. Even though the two countries approach agricultural animal welfare differently, they arrive at the same outcome: institutionalized indifference to animal suffering. To remedy the current regulatory structure, this Article proposes the creation of an independent federal agency— The Animal Welfare Agency (“AWA”)—to regulate the safety and welfare of all animals, including those used in agriculture. The AWA could significantly reduce systemic animal cruelty in both the United States and Brazil and represent an important step toward inserting morality and ethics into our relationships with animals