Carter Dillard

Carter Dillard worked previously as the Animal Legal Defense Fund Director of Litigation, during which time he helped quadruple the number cases the organization had filed and helped oversee its first undercover investigations. Prior to joining the Animal Legal Defense Fund, Carter 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. He also served as General Counsel of Animal Outlook, and Director of farmed animal litigation at the Humane Society of the United States. He has taught on the faculties or held appointments at University of Oxford, Lewis and Clark Law School, Emory University School of Law, and Loyola University New Orleans, College of Law. Carter has been a peer reviewer for the journal Bioethics, his work has been published by Yale, Duke, and Northwestern universities, as well in several peer-reviewed journals, is often recommended reading on the competitive Legal Theory Blog and has been extensively cited. He currently serves as Advisor and Counsel, for the Stable Planet Alliance.

Carter 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, later developed into a peer-reviewed book entitled Justice as a Fair Start in Life, which treats reliance on basic norms other than a just creation norm as a logical fallacy. Carter is the co-founder of the organization Fair Start Movement, which has developed such a just creation norm as a human rights-based, child-centric and “zero baseline” family planning model with an exponentially greater impact on sustainable development and animal protection than downstream alternatives. Carter has begun to implement a transition to child-centric “Fair Start” family planning, where future children are a specially protected class, both as a member of the Steering Committee of the Population Ethics and Policy Research Project, and as a visiting scholar of the Uehiro Center, both at the University of Oxford. Carter has been invited to speak at the UN World Civic Forum and dozens of other conferences, he has appeared on Fox Business News, and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, The Hill, Washington Times, and the International Herald Tribune.