Animal Legal Defense Fund Transparency and Regulatory Affairs Program Summer Clerkships

Description

Term of Employment:
Temporary, Full-time, Non-Exempt, Internship

Location:

Remote position

Who We Are:

The Animal Legal Defense Fund’s mission is to protect the lives and advance the interests of animals through the legal system. The Animal Legal Defense Fund accomplishes this mission by filing high-impact lawsuits to protect animals from harm, providing free legal assistance and training to prosecutors to assure that animal abusers are held accountable for their crimes, supporting tough animal protection legislation and fighting legislation harmful to animals, gathering data about and advocating for effective regulation of animal exploitative industries and providing resources and opportunities to law students and professionals to advance the emerging field of animal law.

Position Term: 35 hours/week for 10 weeks in summer 2026, with a start date at the end of May or beginning of June

Reports to:

Transparency and Regulatory Affairs Program Director

The Animal Legal Defense Fund summer clerkship program gives law students who demonstrate an interest in animal law the opportunity to work with and be trained by top experts in the field. Clerks are integral members of a program team and work on projects that further the current work of the program and advance the mission and goals of the Animal Legal Defense Fund.

Clerks also participate in activities that will allow them to network across the organization with Animal Legal Defense Fund staff and other clerks, and engage them in the mission and goals of the organization.

This position is housed within the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s Transparency and Regulatory Affairs Program, which advocates for better, stronger animal protection laws and regulations. We also use the regulatory process to urge agencies to fulfill their duties and protect animals to the extent required by the law.

Here are some ways that the Animal Legal Defense Fund works within the regulatory process to protect animals:

• We file petitions for rule making:
  The Administrative Procedure Act allows any person or organization to request that a federal agency issue, amend or repeal a rule or regulation. We ask for tougher regulations and rules that are within the agency’s purview.
• We submit comments on proposed rules and regulations:
  Agencies considering changes to rules or regulations, or new rules or regulations, will solicit comments from the public and interested organizations. These comments must be considered before the proposed changes may be made.
• We issue alerts encouraging the public to submit comments of their own so the agency is aware that this is an issue people care about — and, with a critical mass of comments, will be inclined to respond to the public’s concerns. This is a critically important part of the regulatory process.
• We ask agencies to fulfill their regulatory duties:
  Regulations and rules must be enforced, to be effective. The Animal Legal Defense Fund urges agencies to fulfill their regulatory duties, when they have failed to do so — and we issue alerts asking the public to do the same. This is an especially helpful course of action when someone is violating the law in ways that harm animals, but there is no “standing” for us to bring a lawsuit.
• When possible and necessary, these requests may be followed by lawsuits, asking courts to compel agencies to fulfill their legal duties.

The Transparency and Regulatory Affairs Program clerks will conduct research and draft memoranda regarding regulatory matters relevant to animals exploited on factory farms, in puppy mills, in entertainment, and in laboratories. Clerks may assist in drafting regulatory comments and petitions for rule making. Clerks will also draft Freedom of Information Act and state public records requests, analyze responses to these requests, and draft appeals, when necessary.

Clerks will assist TRAP with gathering data for its database of information concerning animal‑abusing industries and in creating spreadsheets tracking entities and numbers of species used in animal exploiting industries. Clerks will conduct factual research in support of TRAP’s…