Abstract
Law centers on the experience of the human species. Yet, emerging scholarly and public conversations advocate for bringing animals into spaces once assumed to be human, a growing field known as animal studies. This Article is the first to experiment with how to integrate the more-than-human experience into the courtroom. It specifically reimagines canonical legal cases from the perspective of the animals involved in them. Through the perspective of the animals at issue, it examines cases in which animal interests were considered by human advocates and decided by human judges. This novel technique of de-centering the human requires developing a wholly new, highly experimental methodological framework for how legal scholars and commentators might expand anthropocentric legal processes (such as adjudicating cases) to consider the perspectives of nonhuman animals. This project rests at the intersection of critical animal studies and the burgeoning fields of animal and biodiversity law. More broadly, this Article considers the potential for law to be used to achieve bold aims. Law school curricula have traditionally emphasized teaching students to “think like a lawyer,”—limiting the creative potential of talented minds to fit the conventionality of the field. This Article presents a different, more innovative approach to legal education and scholarship, in which lawyers and legal scholars reimagine social issues, develop new legal realities, and wield the traditional, time-tested tools of our craft in new ways to reach more desirable social outcomes. We identify and explore how lawyers can use the traditional tools of our field (legislation, regulation, common law, constitutional provisions, and private law) to create positive visions for new ways of more equitably co-existing with nature and nonhuman living beings. We are interested in reforming the law to incorporate principles of interspecies equity, which requires institutional shifts away from assumed anthropocentricity through the development of new tools and techniques to integrate the interests of nonhuman living beings—animals specifically for this work—into the field of law.
Recommended Citation
Challie Facemire & Clayton Kinsey,
Animals in the Courtroom,
32 J. L. & Pol'y
1
(2024).
Available at:
https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/jlp/vol32/iss2/1