Results
Title |
Author | Citation | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finding Our Voice: Challenges and Opportunities For The Animal Law Community | Pamela D. Frasch | 14 Animal Law 1 (2007) |
In this introduction to Volume 14 of Animal Law, the author reflects on the progress of the animal law movement. |
| Five Years of the New Animal Welfare Regime: Lessons Learned from New Zealand's Decision to Modernize Its Animal Welfare Legislation | Peter Sankoff | 11 Animal L. 7 (2005) |
In 1999, New Zealand took an ambitious step to update its animal welfare legislation. The new law included a limited provision to protect Great Apes from scientific experimentation that was heralded internationally as a huge step forward for animals. The Author suggests, however, that New Zealand’s other animals have not fared nearly as well under the new law, and that the notion of New Zealand as the “animal friendly” nation implied by its treatment of primates is more about perception than reality. This article explores the New Zealand experience, and suggests lessons that can be drawn from the modernization of its animal welfare legislation. |
| Forgotten Victims of War: Animals and the International Law of Armed Conflict | Saba Pipia | 28 Animal L. 175 (2022) | The present article analyses the protection of animals in times of armed conflict. The primary objective of this article is to explore the relationship between animal law and international humanitarian law and to find out to what extent rules of animal welfare law can be applied during armed conflict and how international humanitarian law can protect animals. For this purpose, the article firstly provides an overview of legal scholarship, as well as a summary of existing international humanitarian law norms protecting animals. The article also discusses if existing models of protection of non-human victims of war, such as natural environment and cultural heritage, analogously, can be applied to include animals under the protection of international humanitarian law. Furthermore, possible scenarios of animal victimhood during wars are outlined and finally, the article offers several practical suggestions on how animal welfare law can become part of the international law of armed conflict. |
| FREE SPEECH, ANIMAL LAW, AND FOOD ACTIVISM | Howard F. Lyman | 5 Animal L. i (1999) | Howard Lyman discusses a case that provides an example of using the law to force activists to use their scarce resources in court to defend the right of free speech. |
| From Inside the Cage to Outside the Box: Natural Resources as a Platform for Nonhuman | Randall S. Abate & Jonathan Crowe | 5 Global J. Animal L. 54 (2017) | This article considers the legal avenues available to protect nonhuman animals in the U.S. and Australia, focusing particularly on the attribution of legal personhood. Section 2 of the article reviews attempts by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) to establish legal personhood protections for nonhuman animals through writ of habeas corpus petitions under U.S. common law. Section 3 surveys the options for recognition of animal personhood under Australian law, discussing issues of standing, habeas corpus, and guardianship models. Section 4 discusses the growing movement to assign legal personhood rights to natural resources. The article proposes that to the extent that natural resources have received legal personhood protection to recognize their inherent value, similar protections should be afforded to animals. In the meantime, habeas corpus, standing, and guardianship theories provide valuable procedural platforms for incremental progress toward protecting nonhuman animals in both the U.S. and Australia. |
| From Social Justice to Animal Liberation | Carter Dillard and Matthew Hamity | 18 Animal & Nat. Resource L. Rev. 57 (2022) | Protecting and liberating animals is surely part of social justice’s core of freeing the vulnerable from the powerful, but in many ways the animal movement exists outside of that tide. Arguably that is because of its historic focus on the animals themselves, rather than upon the antecedent, anthropocentric, and outcome-determining nature of human power systems, the ones through which humans oppress one another, and the systems many animal advocates unwittingly accept even as those systems undo any progress—though things like population growth—the advocates claim to be making. This myopia makes claims regarding animal law and liberation a misnomer. Recent attacks on women’s bodily autonomy in terminating pregnancies which will also have a devastating impact on nonhumans, and the animal rights movement’s relative silence in the face of these attacks while continuing largely performative campaigns, is exemplary. This article offers recognition of these power systems through an animal rights perspective, systems which threaten humans and nonhumans from a common source, and a framework for threading animal rights into social justice more generally to overcome those specific actors—many of whom masquerade as animal activists—behind the power imbalance. It also offers a test for the success of the transition, whereby normative systems come to rely on true consent more than coercion or incentives, as a sign that power is being redistributed from the powerful to the vulnerable. |
| Fuzzy Toys and Fuzzy Feelings: How the “Disney” Culture Provides the Necessary Psychological Link to Improving Animal Welfare | Lindsay Schafer Hurt | 10 J. Animal & Nat. Resource L. 253 | The connection between pop culture's psychological influences on society and on people's ability to empathize helps explain the legal shift to address practices of animal testing, animal fighting, and other abuse or torturous practices. The media helps cultivate increased sentiment for animal welfare, which is the first hurdle to overcome when advocating for a change regarding animals in the law. This Note discusses specifically how Disney movies featuring animal characters have furthered an interest in animal welfare. This Note further proposes that courts' realization that scientific evidence of suffering is inadequate to measure or identify cruelty is essential to sufficiently provide legal protections to animals. |
| How Nonhuman Animals Were Trapped in a Nonexistent Universe | Steven M. Wise | 1 Animal L. 15 (1995) | The first in a series of articles by the author whose overall purpose is to explain why legal rights need not be restricted to human beings and why a handful of rights that protect fundamental interests of human beings should also protect the fundamental interests of such nonhuman animals as chimpanzees and bonobos. The second article in this series traces the development of the common law as it concerns the relationships between human and nonhuman animals from its beginnings in the Mesopotamian "law code" of the third and second millennia, B.C. until today. |
| HUMAN DRAMA, ANIMAL TRIALS: WHAT THE MEDIEVAL ANIMAL TRIALS CAN TEACH US ABOUT JUSTICE FOR ANIMALS | Katie Sykes | 17 Animal L. 251 (2011) |
The legal system generally does little to protect animals, and one aspect of its inadequacy is a matter of formal structure: under United States and Canadian law, animals are not legal “persons” with an independent right to the protections of the legal system. There are calls to expand the status of animals in the law by providing them with legal standing, the right to be represented by a lawyer, and other formal protections. But, in a way, some of this has happened before. There is a long history, primarily from the medieval and early modern periods, of animals being tried for offenses such as attacking humans and destroying crops. These animals were formally prosecuted in elaborate trials that included counsel to represent their interests. The history of the animal trials demonstrates how, in a human-created legal system, legal “rights” for animals can be used for human purposes that have little to do with the interests of the animals. This history shows us that formal legal rights for animals are only tools, rather than an end in themselves, and highlights the importance not just of expanding formal protections, but of putting them to work with empathy, in a way that strives (despite the inevitable limitations of a human justice system in this respect) to incorporate the animals’ own interests and own point of view. |
| Human Identity: The Question Presented by Human-Animal Hybridization | Joseph Vining | 1 Stan. J. Animal L. & Pol'y 50 (2008) | What makes each of us, as individuals, human to one another, or, more generally, what makes an individual creature human? We have not often had to ask the question because of the species line based on reproductive capacity and incapacity, although “degrees of humanness” were explored in the various eugenic programs of the last century. Now the biotechnological possibility of fusing human and other forms of life is presenting the question in a new and serious way. If the traditional biological means of defining species are no longer reliable, what other criteria might determine what is “human” and what is “nonhuman”? The issue is not just how to conceive of an individual hybrid presented to us, but how to act toward the creature, at the most basic level. Drawing on animal law and theory as well as the history of human eugenics in law and policy, Vining identifies criteria that may one day be used to gauge relative humanness, qualitative and quantitative. He observes that ultimately the difficulty of deciding or agreeing upon what identifies us as human will make even more problematic the current treatment of creatures deemed purely “animal.” In the end he suggests that what the human distinctively brings to the sentient world is general responsibility itself, and that wider contemplation of the real possibility of human-animal hybridization may lead to new ways of thinking about animals, in law and beyond. Human Identity was presented recently as a talk to a longstanding interdisciplinary faculty seminar at the University of Michigan. It is presented largely in its original form here, with footnotes added. |