Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders

Maneesha Deckha's Animals as Legal Beings examines how Canadian law and other legal orders participate in the social construction of the human-animal divide and the abject rendering of animals as property, calling for a transformative legal status or subjectivity called beingness to replace the exploitative property classification. Drawing on feminist animal care tradition, feminist theories of embodiment and relationality, postcolonial theory, and critical animal studies, Deckha argues for a legal subjectivity for animals attentive to their embodied vulnerability and desirous of an animal-friendly cultural shift in the core foundations of anthropocentric legal systems.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 348 pages
Publication date: 04 January 2021
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Maneesha Deckha's book Animals as Legal Beings critically examines how Canadian law and other legal systems around the world contribute to the social construction of the human-animal divide and the abject treatment of animals as property. Through a rigorous and compelling analysis, Deckha proposes a transformative legal status called beingness to replace the exploitative property classification for animals. Drawing on feminist animal care tradition, feminist theories of embodiment and relationality, postcolonial theory, and critical animal studies, Deckha's argument challenges the liberal legal view of animals and advocates for a legal subjectivity that recognizes animals for who they are, rather than their proximity to idealized versions of humanness. The book aims to bring critical animal theorizations and animal law closer together and offers a significant contribution to interdisciplinary debates. It provides a compelling and innovative argument for a more-than-human turn in law and policy.

Weight: 528g
Dimension: 229 x 151 x 24 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781487525873