Three-Minute Legal Talks: The Endangered Species Act Explained

In 1973, Richard Nixon signed into law one of the world’s strongest wildlife conservation bills, the Endangered Species Act. Over 50 years later, the law still carries on its goal of protecting wildlife and plant species from extinction.

Familiar to most Americans, the act created a list with two distinct categories — one for endangered species and another for threatened ones. Animal and plant species listed as endangered are considered already in danger of extinction, while threatened species are heading in that direction.

In all, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and NOAA Fisheries currently list about 1,600 species, with roughly 75% classified as endangered and 25% as threatened as of July 2026.

Lesser known, though, is how species are added to the list, or what protections are set in place for them. In three minutes, Todd Wildermuth, UW Law’s Regulatory Environmental Law & Policy Clinic policy director, discusses these issues and more.

Read the Transcript

Todd Wildermuth (TW): I am Todd Wildermuth. I direct the Environmental Law Program, and I'm the Policy Director of the Environmental Law and Policy Clinic.

UW Law: What does the Endangered Species Act hope to accomplish?

TW: The Endangered Species Act hopes to both prevent future extinctions and recover species that are listed as in need of protection and are presently on either the endangered or threatened species lists.

UW Law: How does a plant or animal end up on the endangered or threatened species list?

TW: To my mind, a plant or animal can end up on the endangered or threatened species list in one of three ways. One, since this is for law school, I will say sometimes it ends up as a matter of litigation.

Two, sometimes the agency itself, through its own research, determines that the best approach would be to have a species on the list in order to help recover it.

And third, and this is the most common form these days, outsiders who are not part of the federal government, whether they be individuals, whether they be organizations, whether they're states or whether they're tribal organizations, can petition to have species listed under the Endangered Species Act, and that triggers a very specific requirement for the federal government to follow.

UW Law: Once a species is listed, what protections are in place?

TW: What Congress put in place were a series of serious protections. One line of those protections applies to all of us, and it generally travels under the name of the no-take prohibition. And what that means is that we are not allowed to harm or harass or directly take through hunting, capturing, chasing, etc. any listed species.

The other major important limitation that is placed is placed on the federal government itself, and the federal government is not allowed to authorize or permit to fund or to carry out any action that would jeopardize the continued existence of the species, or destroy or adversely modify what's called the species' critical habitat, and because many private actors actually rely on federal permits to do things, that requirement that applies to the federal government actually extends indirectly to a wide number of people.

UW Law: How does a species come off the endangered or threatened list?

TW: A species can come off of the list in one of three ways. The first, which is sort of neutral or not terribly interesting, is simply reclassification. We misunderstood taxonomically where the species fit in the tree of life. We've reassessed the situation, and it turns out something that we thought was listable because we thought was viewed one way is actually not listable generally because it's part of a larger group of things that we hadn't perceived before.

The other way that something comes off of the list, unfortunately, is by being declared extinct. Of course, if something is extinct and no longer on the face of the planet, we can't recover it, and we don't need to invest effort in recovering it.

And the third way, the happier way, is through actual recovery, and I think that's what most people think of is that you can come off of the list by meeting certain requirements of having a healthy enough population — that’s one way to think of it — so that you no longer need the protections of the act.

Overall, somewhere around or between 130 and 140 species have been delisted. About 20 or so of those come through that reclassification mechanism. Around 30 or so come from being declared extinct, and the larger part, about 80, have been delisted because they have been considered recovered.

UW Law: Can you share a few species that have bounced back because of the Endangered Species Act?

TW: I'm going to lean pretty heavily on the bird department here, but for the bird lovers out there, we can thank the Endangered Species Act, in part or in full, for some recovery of the bald eagle, the peregrine falcon, the brown pelican, and most recently, the wood stork.