2026 Call for AALTRA Animal Law Prize Nominations
AALTRA awards a research prize at its biennial conference to celebrate and promote animal law research and the scholarly community of animal law and AALTRA is now calling for nominations for this prize.
The AALTRA research prize will be awarded for the most outstanding contribution to the field of animal law by an Australasian scholar/student (whether by residence or birth) or whose work has a focus on these jurisdictions. The work must be in the broad field of animal law. As a guide, this does not include work in which either animals or the law are purely incidental
Ordinarily, the work must have been published in the previous 24 months up to the submission date for the prize. The work must address the position or interests of animals in relation to the law.
The prize will be the amount of AUD500. The winner shall be announced at the AALTRA Animal Law Conference, 27-28 November 2026, University of Technology, Sydney.
To be considered, the paper (in pdf format) should be emailed to Associate Professor Jane Kotzmann (at j.kotzmann@deakin.edu.au) by close of business Friday 4 September 2026. Please include in your email a clear statement that the paper is to be considered for the AALTRA Research Prize.
Applications may be made by either the author themselves or by another person on their behalf. The author’s permission can be evidenced by an email from the author confirming consent to the submission at the time of submission or upon request from the Prize Committee afterwards. The prize will be judged on the basis of the written paper alone. No narrative is required with the submission of the article.
Past recipients
2024: AALTRA awarded the 2024 research prize to Jane Kotzmann, for her article ‘Sentience and Intrinsic Worth as a Pluralist Foundation for Fundamental Animal Rights’ published in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies.
2022: AALTRA awarded the 2022 research prize to Ashleigh P A Best, for her article ‘Material Vulnerabilities and Interspecies Relationalities: a Critical Appraisal of the Legal Status of Animals in Disasters’, Griffith Law Review, 31(2), 287–311. Ms Best was at the time of the prize a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne, and the judges thought her piece was a compelling piece of research on a unique an underexamined area of the law, which clearly showed the power of disasters to “cast new light on weaknesses in the law which operate to make corporeal beings vulnerable.