Law schools at three US universities, which also house substantial biomedical research programs, are to join a small but growing number of schools around the country offering courses in animal rights. In response to a demand from law students, Harvard, Georgetown and Northwestern University, Chicago, will join the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), in providing legal tuition in this field.

Membership of the Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF), a national organization that is pushing for stricter regulation of laboratory animals under the 1966 Animal Welfare Act, has grown from around 100 to 700 over the past 15 years. And the movement was buoyed by ALDF's Supreme Court victory this May in obtaining permission to represent laboratory animals-legal standing-in a case against the US Department of Agriculture (Nature, 400 , 197; 1999).

Steven Wise

Tutor of the new Harvard course and well-known animal rights lawyer Steven Wise says that activist groups are much better funded and more likely to take to the courts than in the past. In response, more lawyers want to specialize in the field. "Many of our students can expect to face an animal law issue at some point in their careers," admits Harvard's assistant dean for Academic Affairs, Alan Ray.

But will the course also train lawyers inclined to sue biomedical research centers like Harvard someday? UCLA's course, which has been running for five years and is also taught by a prominent animal rights campaigner, Tamie Bryant, has seen no campus conflict with the university's biomedical research departments. But Wise is predicting an explosion of cases of the courts uphold the legal standing issue. In addition, he and others say that the rise in cloning and transgenic animal techniques are raising new legal questions.

Wise has already won access to laboratory animal records at the University of Vermont and has been involved with animal rights groups in lawsuits seeking access to such information from other universitives. Wise's prejudice, says executive director of the National Association for Biomedical Research Barbara Rich, makes him unsuitable to teach the course: "The issue here is not that the subject shouldn't be taught, what I would be concerned about is balance." However, Wise claims that he simply encourages his student to engage in a "vigorous" debate over whether animals have any legal rights.

As director of Harvard's Animal Resources Center, Arthur Lage oversees the care of the university's lab animals including 58,000 mice, 1,300 rats as well as hamsters, rabbits and guinea pigs. Lage does not feel threatened by the addition of the course to the Harvard curriculum and hopes to sit in on the classes.