The Scholars Committee is charged with the following:

  • Share current perspectives on animal law and policy;
  • In coordination with the Standards/Science Committee, develop, refine, and maintain “Gold Standards” of research and writing;
  • Survey, review, and advise on programs, projects, and commissions to advance academics and scholarship in animal law, animal policy and related interdisciplinary animal studies;
  • Assist the Institute staff in monitoring ongoing projects and commissions and provides a peer review component; and
  • Contribute to Brooks Institute discussion forums.
Justin Marceau - Chair

Justin F. Marceau is a Professor of Law and the Animal Legal Defense Fund Professor.

Prior to coming to the University of Denver Law School, Marceau was an assistant federal public defender specializing in capital habeas and a law clerk for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Before law school he spent a year living and working in Cairo, Egypt.

Janice Nadler

Janice Nadler is a Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, and Nathaniel L. Nathanson Professor of Law at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law.

She received a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Timothy Pachirat

Timothy Pachirat is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Prior to UMass, he taught in the Politics Department at The New School, and prior to that completed his Ph.D. in political science at Yale University.

He is the author of Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight, Among Wolves: Ethnography and the Immersive Study of Power, The Political in Political Ethnography: Dispatches from the Kill Floor, among others. 

Kristen Stilt

Kristen Stilt is a Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  She also serves as Faculty Director of the Animal Law & Policy Program, Director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program, and is a Deputy Dean.  Stilt was named a Carnegie Scholar for her work on Constitutional Islam, and in 2013 she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.  Her research focuses on animal law, and in particular the intersection of animal law and religious law; Islamic law and society; and comparative constitutional law.

Philip Tedeschi

Philip is a faculty of the Graduate School of Social Work at The University of Denver. He is recognized for expertise in the clinical methods for Animal Assisted Interventions and coordinates the school's Animal-Assisted Social Work Certificate program for Master of Social Work (MSW) students, as well as serving as The Executive Director for the Institute for Human-Animal Connection. He received his MSSW degree for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his specialization was the bio-affiliative connection between people and animals.