Animal Law Seminar: The Laws of Human and Animal Relations

Note: No prerequisites or previous experience in animal law are required. This seminar is open to all, including students who completed Animals and the Law (LAW253). 

Legal scholarship and advocacy on the justice and ethics of how humans interact with other animals is an expanding, complex field that connects us to the most profound and enduring questions about our place in the world and the relations we form with our fellow earthly inhabitants.

While it may not always be obvious, humans are in intimate, personal, and deeply consequential relations with other animals on a daily basis — as food, clothing, entertainment, and as companions and cultural emblems, to name just a few examples. In terms of sheer scale, the relation that humans have with animals we use in systems of food production, which far exceeds every other type of human-animal interaction, produces some of the most dramatic human impacts on the ecology and environment of our planet. At the same time, it forms an essential part of our strategy for human subsistence and a principal source of human wealth.

In this class, we will examine the legal dimensions of the human-animal relationship in the context of production and extraction. One aim of this class is to familiarize ourselves with the deceptively simple legal skill of issue framing and diagnosis — or what Wendy Brown and Janet Halley describe as the “discernment of how the very problem we want to solve is itself produced.”

In our exploration, we will examine the laws and regulations of animal use, which may include reviewing criminal animal cruelty provisions, rules of animal transport and slaughter, industry guidelines on animal production, and common law property principles as they relate to the human ownership of animals. In examining how the “animal problem” has been framed by various legal scholars and animal advocates, views covered may include animal legal rights theories, theories of personhood and property, and anti-cruelty/animal welfare frameworks. Our review may also include portions of my book manuscript which articulate a new framework for understanding the legal underpinnings of animal extraction as a distinct law of predation. It may also involve interacting with and reflecting upon the exhibit in the Bora Laskin Law Library, “Necessary Cruelty,” which will be mounted for the Fall semester.