The State of Animal Law in Canada – Progress and Challenges

In October 2019, the Schulich School of Law , in partnership with Animal Justice , hosted Canada’s first national animal law conference. The Canadian Animal Law Conference 2019 was first envisioned as focusing on developments in domestic law, as it governs our legal relationships with nonhuman animals. But when the conference was announced, interest and submissions came from around the world. The scope and success of the event, which sold out months ahead of time, made one thing very clear: animal law is on rise, in Canada and throughout the world. In the following paragraphs, I offer some reflections on the rapid, and seemingly unstoppable, growth of animal law, a discipline that used to sit at the margins of legal academia and practice.