Subject: Fwd: Rutgers Animal
Rights Clinic No More
Date: 06.05.1999 14:47
Received: 06.05.1999
19:27
The article about the closing of
Rutger's Animal Law Clinic is pasted below. Here's the
email for Rutgers Animal Law. Please write and ask him
not to close it. We need to let him know how important it
is and that the hunters & special interest groups
aren't the only ones out there!
mailto:director@animal-law.org
The
Philadelphia Inquirer, May
4, 1999
Law clinic, an advocate for animals, to close
The founder of the unusual center
at Rutgers says he is tired of fending off
``enemies.''
By Emilie Lounsberry
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
Has America become so litigious
that even animals deserve expanded rights under the law?
Should they not be eaten, dissected, hunted, or used in
medical experiments?
For nearly a decade, the Animal
Rights Law Center at the Rutgers University School of Law
has been an unusual legal laboratory for changing how the
justice system regards animals and for challenging the
conventional notion that animals are the property of
their owners, just as slaves were. But now, law professor
Gary L. Francione says he is closing the clinic --the
only center of its kind in the country. The animal-rights
movement has fizzled, students have become more
conservative, and, Francione said, he is tired of fending
off efforts by what he considers anti-animal groups --
chiefly hunters -- to get fund-raising and legal-strategy
information about his clinic.
"We've had a cadre of enemies out
there who have been trying to get us in one fashion or
another," said Francione, 44, who founded the clinic in
1990 soon after joining the Rutgers law school faculty.
"Every single time we file a case . . . it generates a
lot of heat."
Law schools have often set up legal
clinics to provide students with practical experience,
typically on subjects such as the environment, women's
rights, immigration, and other public-interest
topics.
But by representing the interests
of nonhumans, the Animal Rights Law Center is certainly
one of the most unusual.
"The clinic was a magnificent
experience," Francione said. "We had marvelous
students. We did a lot of
incredibly exciting litigation. . . . While it lasted, it
was great. I just think it's time now to at least take a
hiatus, and we have to wait and see if the pendulum
swings back."
Since it opened, the lawyers and
law students in the laboratory have gone to bat for
youngsters who could not bear to dissect frogs and for
groups trying to stop deer hunts. Francione even won a
reprieve for New Jersey's own death-row dog, an Akita
named Taro who was spared execution after he was moved to
another state.
Students spend about 18 to 24 hours
each week working on classes that involve such topics as
the use of animals for food, hunting, research and
entertainment and attend a weekly class with Francione
and his wife, Anna Charlton, a former Wall Street lawyer
who is staff attorney for the center.
"The clinic has changed my life,"
said student Lydia Zaidman, who graduates this spring.
"It's really been a great experience."
Even those who disagree with his
animal-rights views say Francione cares deeply about his
cause. "He has passion," said Jayne Mackta of the New
Jersey Association for Bio-Medical Research. "He is a
well-respected legal mind."
Mackta said many people did not
realize that the animal-rights movement takes the
position that animals should not be used by humans for
any purposes. And that, she said, could mean that humans
would miss out on many lifesaving medicines and
vaccines.
"We believe that it's critical to
use animals responsibly for experiments," she said.
Hunters also say the animal-rights movement is
misguided.
Mike Yazel, a vice president of the
National Muzzle Loading Rifle Association, said there
already were laws to ensure that animals are not treated
with cruelty. Expanding the rights of animals, he said,
would just add intrusive rules and overburden the legal
system.
"I don't feel their arguments are
realistic," said Yazel, who has followed the work of the
clinic.
Charlton, who monitors the center's
telephone hotline and Web site, said the clinic received
about 100 calls a week and more than 100 other inquiries
on its Web site. Often, she said, there are questions
about veterinarian malpractice or how to organize
demonstrations against deer hunts. And then there are the
"sobbing phone calls the night before" frog dissection in
biology class.
Charlton said she considered the
student-rights cases to have been some of the clinic's
sweetest victories: "Those have been very difficult
fights, especially the veterinary-school cases," in which
students have objected to practicing surgery on healthy
animals.
