Legal systems around the world facilitate the exploitation of animals. The results are devastating not only to the animals involved but to people and planetary ecosystems. How can we transform legal systems to reverse this devastation and instead facilitate animal well-being, flourishing, and rights? In this course, Professor Deckha introduces the ideas animal law scholars have advanced to dramatically re-shape legal systems, including her own proposal, advanced in her book Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Systems. The course considers the strengths of each proposal as well as their limits. The course uses an intersectional analytic that draws from the feminist animal care tradition, as well as feminist theories of embodiment and relationality, postcolonial theory, and critical animal studies, to compare and contrast proposals inviting learners to consider how the law can move forward for animals in an impactful and non-reductive way despite its anthropocentric foundations. At the end of the course, learners will have a solid understanding of why the law does not protect animals even though it claims to, how this failure is connected to human rights struggles, what legal momentum is currently building for animals around the world, and various contemporary leading proposals as to how to continue to build momentum and transform the law.

Instructor

Maneesha Deckha