Tess Vickery is a practising lawyer in Sydney, Australia. She holds a Bachelor of Laws (First Class Honours) from Macquarie University and a Master of Animal Law from the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School.

As a litigation and class actions lawyer, Tess worked on several high-profile cases, including the Volkswagen “dieselgate” litigation. She also established her former firm’s ‘Animal Law pro bono program’. A highlight of this work was collaborating with the Animal Law Institute on “Nala’s Case,” which successfully established a breach of statutory consumer guarantees in relation to a sick dog sold by a breeder.

Since 2019, Tess has served as Chief of Staff to the Hon Emma Hurst MLC, the first female elected representative of the Australian Animal Justice Party. During this time, the office has secured over $100 million in government funding for animal protection and delivered a range of significant legislative and policy reforms. These include mandating the “right to release” for animals used in experimentation, reforming animal sexual abuse laws, banning forced swim and forced smoking experiments, outlawing convenience killing in pounds, outlawing the breeding of cetaceans for entertainment, and more.

Tess is also a sessional academic at Macquarie University and a teaching fellow at the University of New South Wales, teaching Animal Law.

Tess has published multiple academic works on animal law in Australia and the United States, including the chapter “The Politics of Achieving Reforms” in Animal Law in Australasia – A Quiet Crisis (2025) and “Animal Political Parties” in the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Animal Law (2025).

Tess was the recipient of a 2020 Seeds Award from the International Society for Animal Rights and was named a 2021 Centre for Animal Law Studies Ambassador.