By Jeremy Conrad
Even from a young age, Jeffrey Kerr knew he wanted to be a force for public good. A childhood interest in American history fueled Kerr’s early ambition to become an attorney. “I knew I wanted to be a litigator,” he says.
“One of my earliest heroes was Thurgood Marshall [because of] his work at the NAACP, of course, and Brown v. Board of Education, and all of his civil rights work .… I knew I wanted to get into nonprofit law, something that was for the public good. I wanted to be in public service in some way,” says Kerr.
After completing his undergraduate degree at George Mason University, where he played Division I baseball, Kerr attended law school at the University of Virginia. An unexpected event in the mid-1990s would change Kerr’s life and come to define the focus of his legal practice.
“I had been out of law school for about six years, I guess, and I went to hear this lecture one evening,” Kerr recalls. “But the person giving the lecture got stuck in one of D.C.’s Beltway traffic jams, as we’ve all experienced, so his teaching assistant had to give the lecture.” The stand-in lecturer, an animal rights activist, delivered the spur-of-the-moment presentation titled “Did Your Food Have a Face?”
“It just hit me right between the eyes,” Kerr says. “I’ve been a vegan since that night.”
In December 1993, Kerr became a staff attorney for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), responding to a one-sentence ad for the position. In February 1994, the organization’s general counsel left, and Kerr seized the opportunity.
“I had just been there a couple of months, but I had been corporate counsel and vice president of administration at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation in Bethesda, Maryland, for several years,” he says. “So, when my predecessor announced he was leaving, I went to Ingrid Newkirk, our cofounder. I said, ‘I believe I can do the job if you want to give me the chance.’ And she did, so I was promoted to general counsel and director of finance.”
At the time, PETA was rarely involved in offensive litigation. Kerr and his colleagues were focused on defending the organization’s nonprofit status against industries it was critical of. During Kerr’s 30-year tenure as general counsel, he led efforts to expand PETA’s network of international affiliates and later developed the organization’s capacity to bring litigation supporting their advocacy on behalf of animals.
“It was a natural progression,” Kerr says. “As we grew in the early 2000s, bringing more people in-house … (we now have a legal team of 22 lawyers), and as animal law grew, we were able to engage with a broad array of issues. We’ve been really fortunate to have had a hand in essentially creating an area of legal practice, creating animal law.”
While recognizing that many practitioners have contributed to the evolution of animal law, Kerr says PETA lawyers have been among those who have led its development. “Many people [grew up] with [awareness of] animal rights and, more importantly, they went to law school at a time when they were able to take animal law courses or participate in animal law clinics,” Kerr says. “People can go to law school with the intention of pursuing animal law as a career.”
Pushing Legal Boundaries
PETA’s work has raised novel questions regarding the scope of legal protections in lawsuits that are structurally ingenious and narratively compelling. In March 2025, PETA sued the National Institutes of Health and National Institute of Mental Health, alleging a violation of the First Amendment right to receive communications from willing speakers, including the macaques Beamish, Sam Smith, Nick Nack, and Guinness, who are held in government laboratories.
“Everybody understands the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech,” Kerr explains. “What they don’t understand is the corresponding and converse right, which is the right to receive communications … the right to listen.”
“Your right to speak is useless if those who want to receive that speech don’t have a corresponding right to listen,” Kerr adds. “In this case, we are arguing to the court that PETA’s First Amendment right to receive communications does not depend on whether the speaker, in this case the macaques, has any corresponding First Amendment right themselves at all.”
Kerr draws parallels to precedent establishing the right for people to receive communist literature produced outside of the United States. “The key thing here, from our perspective, is that in relation to animals, it is an irrefutable, undeniable scientific fact that these macaques, these primates, communicate,” Kerr says. “They communicate in many of the same ways that we do, with facial gestures, grimacing, body postures, sounds, you name it … So, they are undeniably communicating, and we believe that we have a right to receive that communication.”
The creativity with which PETA structures and presents legal arguments has been a source of both personal enjoyment and professional responsibility for Kerr. “We are very fortunate, as lawyers, to be able to go to work each day and try to conceive of ways in which we can use the laws and our judicial system to have as big an impact as possible,” Kerr says. “Ending or reducing abuse inflicted on animals … that’s a wonderful calling, and it’s a huge privilege to be able to do that. I can tell you that none of us takes it for granted.”
Kerr acknowledges that not everyone appreciates PETA’s work, but he finds the hostility toward the organization as a sign of its effectiveness. “We are fighting multibillion-dollar industries. These are companies and individuals who have made entire careers out of abusing and exploiting animals, and when you’re trying to stop them, you are going to get a hostile reaction,” Kerr says. “But it has been that way since PETA was founded in 1980 and, you know, we’re clearly on the right side of history, and things are clearly moving in the right direction. Not as quickly as we want. There’s still so much work to be done, but we’re making headway.”
‘You Have to Be the First Sometimes’
In a world in which news about the natural world — from the pollution or destruction of environments to the extinction of species — is often distressingly apocalyptic, Kerr remains refreshingly optimistic.
“When I went to law school, animal law wasn’t even a thing, and now it’s in every major law school. Graduates come out of law school every year specifically intending to practice animal law, and we are making great inroads through our Endangered Species Act cases,” Kerr says. “We gutted what’s called the big cat cub-petting industry … which you saw in [Netflix’s] Tiger King. We were able to get precedent saying that the premature separation of tiger cubs from their mothers and forcing them into being handled for photo ops is a violation of the Endangered Species Act, and that’s wonderful.”
“We were able — through our 13th Amendment lawsuit, public protesting, and government lobbying — to force SeaWorld to stop breeding orcas and to get them out of shows,” he adds.
Kerr says PETA’s orca lawsuit created a massive change. “The enslavement of animals is absolutely a part of the conversation now, and our lawsuit was the first time someone sought to apply constitutional protections [under the 13th Amendment] to animals,” Kerr says.
Other victories include forcing Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus to stop using animals. “They closed up and they’re back now, but it’s all human performers,” Kerr says. “These are massive sea changes in the way that people think about animals, and there’s definitely progress in the right direction. The law, unfortunately, is a very conservative and slow-to-change profession, but we’re going to keep trying to kick open the courthouse doors and make progress wherever and whenever we can.”
“You have to be the first sometimes,” Kerr adds.
Kerr notes that sometimes victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat. “You can win even when you lose,” he says, citing PETA’s groundbreaking monkey selfie case. “Even though we didn’t win that case, a decision I will always disagree with, the result was a settlement in which the photographer agreed to donate 25 percent of the gross proceeds from his use of the photographs to the preservation of macaque habitats or to the benefit of the macaque population there in Indonesia,” Kerr points out.
“It’s the first time in history that an animal will benefit directly from the intellectual property of his own creation,” he continues. “Think about that for a moment. Had we not brought that case, that would not have happened, and part of our job is to hold a mirror to the hypocrisy of our legal system and our laws.”
Kerr was recently named inaugural chief operating officer of PETA Foundation, though he will continue to serve as chief legal officer for the broader organization. In many ways, the new title reflects the functions Kerr has had responsibility for throughout his career.
As with others before him, Kerr has challenged preconceptions regarding the scope of justice, seeking a more generous interpretation of its protections. Quoting Newkirk, PETA’s cofounder, Kerr says the organization’s work “removes a teaspoon of cruelty from an ocean of suffering.”
But Kerr deflects attention from his own contributions, saying that he stands on the shoulders of giants and relies on the tireless efforts of his colleagues, which Thurgood Marshall might have said about his work.
Reach D.C. Bar staff writer Jeremy Conrad at [email protected].
