Wagman on Living and Teaching Animal Law

Bruce Wagman has published an article called "Growing Up With Animal Law: From Courtrooms to Casebooks," 60 J. Leg. Ed. 193 (Nov. 2010). Here is the intro:

Over the past eighteen years I have had the rare privilege of riding on the waves of intellectual, legal and academic development of the field of animal law. I started by incorporating isolated bits of pro bono work into a civil litigation practice and in 1996 I began teaching animal law. Since late 2005 my work has consistently been more than 90 percent animal law. I have had the honor of teaching full semester animal law classes more than twenty times at four Bay Area law schools, guest lecturing and speaking at conferences and classes in other schools across the nation, and co-authoring Animal Law: Cases and Materials, originally published in 2000 and now in its fourth edition.2 Each day I am grateful for the gift of this practice, the result of a truly providential mix of coincidence and circumstance. My path as a lawyer for the animals, and as an animal law professor and lecturer, has paralleled the incredible growth in the field. During my tenure in animal law’s thrall it has become a rapidly growing, vital social justice movement. It has developed much like environmental law, its natural older cousin, which attracted so many in the 1960s and 1970s. Given that animal law and I have grown up together, I have been asked to write this article, which will discuss our mutual path in practice and academia.