University of San Francisco Law Professor Matthew Liebman received the Deborah Rhode Prize for Early Career Scholars, awarded by International Association of Legal Ethics (IALE), for his Maryland Law Review article titled “Representing Animals,” which explores “the ethics of legal representation in one of the most unexplored and complicated contexts: cases involving nonhuman animals.” Liebman’s paper focuses on theories of lawyer accountability and offers a framework for taking responsibility for “the thorny ethical issues that arise in representing nonhumans, who we cannot fully comprehend, yet whose voices cry out for justice.”

Liebman joined the USF faculty in 2020 as the endowed Justice for Animals chair and as an associate professor of law. Before coming to USF, he practiced for 12 years with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, including three years as the organization’s director of litigation. The late Deborah Rhode had an interest in animal rights and was the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at SLS until her death in 2021. Widely recognized as one of the country’s most frequently cited scholars on legal ethics, Rhode was the first president of the IALE.