More-than-Human Legalities: Advocating an 'Animal Turn' in Law and Society

• Author: Irus Braverman
• Pages: 307-321

The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction

What is the role of nonhumans, and of nonhuman animals in particular, in the

constitution of law? How should legal systems account for societies that include

not only humans but also nonhuman entities? What are the intersections between

law and nonhuman life? And how to overcome the anthropocentric biases in

modern legal systems? Such questions and others may provide fertile grounds for

law and society investigations. Despite the richness and complexity of these inves-

tigations, however, the law and society community has typically relegated the

“question of the animal” to the discourse of animal rights. Within this discourse,

legal rights are extended to certain nonhuman animals through the same liberal

framework that has afforded humans’ rights beforehand: vertebrates, inverte-

brates, microbes, and non‐living entities must first cross Western law’s threshold

of personhood to obtain rights.

This chapter suggests, alternatively, that socio‐legal scholarship could greatly

benefit from moving beyond the rights discourse of animal law to a new subject of

inquiry: more‐than‐human legalities. By acknowledging the myriad ways of being in

the world, their inherent interconnections, and their manifestations in and constitu-

tions of law, more‐than‐human legalities extend the advocacy‐oriented scholarship

of animal rights to highlight how both animality and humanness are deeply

embedded in the construction of law and, reciprocally, how law is acutely relevant

for constituting the animal. Indeed, while nonhumans render law’s operations – in

fact, its very existence as such – possible, law also constitutes animal life and renders

it meaningful in a variety of ways.

More‐than‐Human Legalities

Advocating an “Animal Turn”

in Law and Society

Irus Braverman

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