• Faculty

Conley Wouters

Titles

• Director, Farmed Animal Advocacy Clinic
• Associate Professor of Law

Degrees

• LLM, Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis and Clark Law School
• JD, Cornell Law School
• PhD, Brandeis University
• MA, Brandeis University
• BA, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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Biography

Conley Wouters is an associate professor of Law and the director of the Farmed Animal Advocacy Clinic at VLGS. Previously, Professor Wouters taught legal writing, contracts, and animal law at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law, where he served as the faculty advisor of UIC’s Student Animal Legal Defense Fund chapter and developed its series of public lectures in animal law. He has also taught legal writing at Suffolk Law School and Detroit Mercy Law, as well as an environmental law seminar. Before joining legal academia, Wouters worked as a commercial litigation associate at the Los Angeles and Chicago offices of a global law firm.

From 2022–2026, Wouters maintained a solo pro bono practice called Karuna Law, where he handled a variety of cases including a multi-year public records campaign against the Chicago Transit Authority over the alleged mistreatment of security canines, which resulted in a lawsuit and favorable settlement. He has provided pro bono representation to national farmed animal protection organizations on various matters, including multiple lawsuits targeting the abuse of steers in rodeo events. He was an inaugural recipient of the Animal Legal Defense Fund’s Compassionate Counsel Award. Wouters is a frequent speaker at national animal law conferences and symposia, and his scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Animal Law Review, the Journal of Animal Rights Law, and the Animal and Natural Resource Law Review. He has also published scholarship on legal storytelling, experiential learning, and Buddhist approaches to legal pedagogy.

Wouters is a member of the Council on Legal Education at GW Law’s Animal Legal Education Initiative, the Membership Vice Chair of the American Bar Association’s TIPS-Animal Law Committee, and the Chair-Elect of the Animal Law Section of the Association of American Law Schools. He received a BA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, an MA and PhD in English from Brandeis University, and a JD from Cornell Law School, where he served as an Articles Editor of the Cornell Law Review. He holds an LLM in Animal Law from the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis and Clark Law School.

Expertise

• Animal Law
• Legal Writing

Departments

• Farmed Animal Advocacy Clinic