[Wednesday, September 17, 2025] A Bill of Rights for Animals

[Audrey Becker]

Hello,

The NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy will be hosting an event with speaker Cass R. Sunstein on September 17, 2025. For additional information and to register as an in-person or online attendee, please see the flyer below.

We hope to see you there!

Warm regards,

Audrey

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The NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy presents A Bill of Rights for Animals with Cass Sunstein Wednesday, September 17, 2025 from 4:00pm-5:15pm ET Hemmerdinger Hall | Silver Center 31 Washington Place Vegan reception to follow Register to Attend In Person Register to Attend Online About the talk Some regulations do not only reduce human deaths, injuries, and illnesses; they also protect nonhuman animals. Regulatory Impact Analyses, required by prevailing executive orders, usually do not disclose or explore benefits or costs with respect to nonhuman animals, even when those benefits or costs are significant. This is an inexcusable gap. If a regulation prevents dogs, horses, or cats from being killed or hurt, the benefits should be specified and quantified. This proposition holds even if those benefits are in some sense incidental to the main goal of the regulation. At the same time, turning the relevant benefits into monetary equivalents raises serious challenges, akin to those raised by the valuation of statistical children. About the speaker Cass R. Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy Register to Attend In Person Register to Attend Online This event is hosted by the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy and co-sponsored by NYU Animal Studies, the NYU Wild Animal Welfare Program, the NYU Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness, and the NYU Center for Bioethics. The NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy (NYU CMEP) is an endowed research center that examines the nature and intrinsic value of nonhuman minds, with special focus on animals and AI systems. We also engage in outreach and field building activities, hosting events and supporting early-career researchers. If you are not currently on our email list and would like to join, you can sign up here. If you would no longer like to receive emails from the NYU Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy, please request to be removed from our list by emailing audrey.ly...@nyu.edu.