Results
| Title |
Author |
Citation | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| ARE WOMEN PERSONS? | Drucilla Cornell | 3 Animal L. 7 (1997) | This article provides a brief look at "rights theory" regarding women in comparison to animals. |
| A Dubious Grail: Seeking Tort Law Expansion and Limited Personhood as Stepping Stones Toward Abolishing Animals' Property Status | Richard L. Jr. Cupp | 60 SMU L. Rev. 3 (2007) |
Many animal rights legal advocates are seeking more manageable steps that may someday lead to the elimination or modification of property status. This Article critiques such efforts, specifically focusing on two potential stepping stones that may be perceived as particularly desirable for animal rights activists: seeking limited personhood for intelligent species of animals, such as chimpanzees; and the possible expansion of tort law to provide animals standing as plaintiffs whose interests are represented by court-appointed humans. This Article will analyze Steven Wise's work in Rattling the Cage and Drawing the Line, advocating limited personhood for some animal species, and David Favre's proposals in A New Tort, as illustrative of efforts at incremental movement toward animal rights and the abolition or modification of property status for animals. |
| Animals as More Than 'Mere Things,' but Still Property: A Call for Continuing Evolution of the Animal Welfare Paradigm | Richard L. Cupp, Jr. | University of Cincinnati Law Review, Forthcoming; Pepperdine University Legal Studies Research Paper No. 19. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2788309 | Abstract: Survival of the animal welfare paradigm (as contrasted with a rights-based paradigm creating legal standing for at least some animals) depends on keeping pace with appropriate societal evolution favoring stronger protections for animals. Although evolution of animal welfare protection will take many forms, this Article specifically addresses models for evolving conceptualizations of animals’ property status within the context of animal welfare. For example, in 2015 France amended its Civil Code to change its description of companion animals and some other animals from movable property to “living beings gifted with sensitivity,” while maintaining their status as property. This Article will evaluate various possible approaches courts and legislatures might adopt to highlight the distinctiveness of animals’ property status as compared to inanimate property. Although risks are inherent, finding thoughtful ways to improve or elaborate on some of our courts’ and legislatures’ animals-as-property characterizations may encourage more appropriate protections where needed under the welfare paradigm, and may help blunt arguments that animals are “mere things” under the welfare paradigm. Animals capable of pain or distress are significantly different than ordinary personal property, and more vigorously emphasizing their distinctiveness as a subset of personal property would further both animal welfare and human interests. |
| Rebuilding the Wall | Bill Davis | 7 Animal L. 221 (2001) | The debate about whether nonhuman animals deserve legal rights encompasses an ever broadening range of theories and strategies. Most thinkers pushing for nonhuman animal rights reject speciesism, which they view as an often tacit foundation for their adversaries’ arguments. Yet almost every current contributor to the debate—whether they favor or disfavor the extension of rights beyond the human sphere—engages in some form of intelligenceism by focusing disproportionate attention on humanlike animals. This essay submits that nonhuman animal advocates must recognize this pervasive intelligenceist bias and be wary of the detrimental effects its substitution for speciesism could have on their long-term objectives. There is a suspicion that some crucial perspective has been omitted from consideration, that the conclusion is as much a product of myopia as of logic. |
| TEACHING POSTHUMANIST ETHICS IN LAW SCHOOL: THE RACE, CULTURE, AND GENDER DIMENSIONS OF STUDENT RESISTANCE | Maneesha Deckha | 16 Animal L. 287 (2010) |
This Essay challenges laws’ hegemonic humanist boundaries by analyzing the challenges involved in mainstreaming posthumanist subjects into the legal curricula. Posthumanist subjects in legal education are perceived as marginal and unworthy of serious discussion and scholarship. |
| CRITICAL ANIMAL STUDIES AND ANIMAL LAW | Maneesha Deckha | 18 Animal L. 207 (2012) |
Law is anthropocentric. With the limited exception of its treatment of the corporation, law is a system of rules that privileges the concept of the human and ascribes reality through a human perspective. Appreciating this, it is truly impressive that animal issues in the law have become so prominent throughout the legal education system. With this increased exposure to posthumanist critiques of the legal system and its status for and treatment of animals, an increasing number of those involved in legal education are rethinking the law’s species-based hierarchy that places humans at the apex. This flourishing interest in animal law is paralleled by growth in the field of Critical Animal Studies (CAS). However, these two disciplines have developed independently of each other. Acknowledging this, animal law scholarship is currently poised to incorporate the insights of CAS. Integrating such insight into the analysis of animal issues in the law will rectify the speciesist and otherwise exclusionary formulations of the socially constructed differences between various species, which have so far been unquestioned assumptions. CAS offers an understanding of these socially constructed differences and advances a common mission between issues identified as animal injustices and those identified as human injustices. CAS stresses the interconnection between human and animal issues, not simply parallels. This important synthesis can subvert the confinement of animal issues in the legal sphere and is key to extending these essential issues into a more diverse community. |
| The Salience of Species Difference For Feminist Theory | Maneesha Deckha | 17 Hastings Women's L.J. 1 (Winter 2006) |
The article begins in Part I of by examining species difference as a social construction similar to race, gender and other identity and hierarchy markers historically understood as biological. In Part II, while not claiming identicalness in the trajectories of different oppressions, the author discusses how the discursive construction of species difference bears a close resemblance to that of gender and race narratives. The article concludes by calling upon our affective responses to imagine animals as possible candidates for personhood and rights, and, further, to question why being human should be a qualification for justice. |
| Speaking for the Modern Prometheus: The Significance of Animal Suffering to the Abolition Movement | Elizabeth L. DeCoux | 16 Animal L. 9 (2009) |
This Article reviews the theories and methods of Abolitionists and Welfarists and suggests one reason that they have failed to relieve animal suffering and death: Welfarists use the right tool in the service of the wrong goal; Abolitionists work toward the right goal but expressly decline to use the right tool. Specifically, Welfarists accurately portray the appalling conditions in which animals live and die, but they inaccurately claim that welfare measures can remedy those appalling conditions without any challenge to the property status of animals. Abolitionists correctly assert that the exploitation of animals must end, and they depict the astonishing rate at which animals are killed and eaten, but they typically spare their audience the unpleasant subject of animal suffering. The thesis of this Article is that the tide of animal suffering and death will turn only when Abolitionists employ the tool used to achieve social change throughout the history of the United States: accurately depicting the suffering of the oppressed, in image and narrative. |
| EMPATHY WITH ANIMALS: A LITMUS TEST FOR LEGAL PERSONHOOD? | Carter Dillard | 19 Animal L. 1 (2012) | This is one of the fundamental questions that frame the study of animal law: To what extent should nonhuman animals be considered legal persons? Of course, this question presupposes that we share or can arrive at a common and stable conception of legal personhood. In fact, there are a variety of conceptions of legal personhood. This Introduction will explore one in particular and, in the process, question the extent to which simply being born Homo sapiens satisfies the potentially complex and demanding requirements of being a legal person. This argument will lead us to reframe animal law a bit and question whether we protect animals by focusing on their status or whether we are better off focusing on the status of humans—and not so much who we are but who, as legal persons that constitute legalities, we ought to be. |
| 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. |