Role: Director of Litigation for the Animal Legal Defense Fund
Cotati, California USA

  Contact: cdillard@aldf.org

  Research Interests:
Reproductive Rights | Animal Rights

Carter Dillard is the director of litigation for the Animal Legal Defense Fund. Prior to joining ALDF, Carter was appointed to the faculty of Loyola University New Orleans, College of Law, as a Westerfield Fellow. He also served as an Honors Program attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice and as a legal advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in the National Security Law Division. Carter later joined Compassion Over Killing as general counsel and then the Humane Society of the United States, where he served as director of farm animal litigation. He has a B.A. from Boston College, a J.D., Order of the Coif and with honors, from Emory University, and an LL.M. from New York University where he wrote his thesis under Jeremy Waldron. He is a peer reviewer for the journal Bioethics, and his work has been published by Yale, Duke, and Northwestern universities. Carter has been invited to speak at the UN World Civic Forum, has appeared on Fox Business News, and he has been quoted as an animal law expert in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Carter’s publications include: The Primary Right, 29 PACE ENVTL. L. REV. _ (2012) (peer reviewed); Procreation, Harm, and the Constitution, 105 NW. U. L. REV. COLLOQUY 5 (2010); Future Children as Property, 17 DUKE J. GENDER L. & POL'Y 47 (2010); Prospective Parents and the Children’s Rights Convention, 25 AM. U. INT. L. REV. 485 (2010); Antecedent Law: The Law of People-Making, 79 MISS L. J. 873 (2010); Valuing Having Children, 12 J.L. & FAM. STUD. 151 (2010); Child Welfare and Future Persons, 43 GA. L. RE V. 367 (2008); and Rethinking the Procreative Right, 10 YALE HUM. RTS. & DEV. L.J. 1 (2007). Carter has presented work at the UN World Civic Forum, the Just World Institute - University of Edinburgh, George Washington University School of Law, and before the American Philosophical Association.

While at Emory, Carter worked with Professors Martha A. Fineman and and Ani Satz to develop work on prospective parents’ moral and legal duties to future children (a uniquely vulnerable class of persons) and will examine the extent to which any legal system designed to distribute societal goods to vulnerable subjects in a fair and equitable manner must take into account its role, whether by act or omission, in creating those subjects. He will examine how states can use equality of opportunity as a benchmark to determine what constitutes threshold harm to future children. His project builds on the work of Ronald Green, and on the argument that future children are owed a quality of life equal to that of others in the child's birth cohort.