Justin Marceau is an anomaly. He grew up in rural Montana, in a family that raised animals on their own property. Yet he is now a leading advocate for animal rights. He went to the Air Force Academy to become a pilot. Yet he went to Harvard Law School to study ways to challenge our government and now defends people who take direct action – breaking laws where necessary. But perhaps most curiously, he is a lawyer in a nation with the highest incarceration rate in the world. Yet he does not believe in any traditional notion of “punishment.”

It’s hard to explain how much of a departure this is from conventional legal thinking. Our entire system of justice is built on the idea that incarceration and other forms of punishment are crucial to stopping wrongdoing. But what if that idea is all wrong? What if the evidence on punishment shows that, in many cases, it just reinforces the very wrongs that it is trying to correct? 

Animal cruelty is the example we discuss in this podcast. But the logic here is both deeper and broader than that. Justin asks us to reimagine justice, and in the process, we may just have to reimagine ourselves. That’s precisely what Justin did. And we can learn something not just from his important intellectual work, including his recent book Beyond Cages, but from his personal story of change.

Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment (Justin Marceau’s book)

Palliative Animal Law: The War on Animal Cruelty - Harvard Law Review

Music by Moby: Everything That Rises