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Abstract: To date, how American governments have managed mountain lion populations has received little to no attention in the legal scholarship. There is a substantial body of legal scholarship examining the management of grizzly bear and wolf populations, largely because managing these predators under the Endangered Species Act raises complex administrative law and federalism questions. And even when predator management is discussed generally, the focus remains on wolves; mountain lions are treated as a sort of adjunct species, the presumption being that managing mountain lions is effectively like managing wolves. But that is not the case. Mountain lions pose dramatically different management challenges than wolves.
To begin, for the past fifty years, wolves in the lower 48 have been managed under the federal ESA; “wolf law” today is largely, if not entirely, federal administrative law. In contrast, “Mountain Lion Law” is entirely state law; each state manages (or does not manage) its mountain lions as it sees fit, usually under a managed sport hunting model. But perhaps the most salient distinction between wolf and mountain lion management is that wolves do not attack people, and mountain lions do. Remarkably, in the long arc of American history, there are no documented reports in the lower 48 of a healthy wild wolf killing or even attacking a human. In contrast, in the summer of 2025 alone, mountain lions attacked an eleven-year-old girl in Malibu, California; a four-year-old child hiking with his family on a popular National Park trail in Washington; a man walking his dog in a suburb of Phoenix; and a summer camp employee in Northern California.
Such attacks make good copy; every mountain lion attack is detailed in the press, often in gruesome detail. Consequently, mountain lion management has become a national discussion. Against this backdrop, perhaps the time is ripe for a dedicated legal history of the American mountain lion.
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