Serrin Rutledge-Prior, postdoctoral fellow with A.P.P.L.E, presents a chapter titled “All animals are interested: An account of interests as the basis of legal inclusion” at a virtual meeting of the Animals in the Law and Humanities Working Group on the 18th of February 2025.
Abstract: This chapter, drawn from Multispecies Legality: Animals and the Foundation of Legal Inclusion (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming – June 2025), presents an alternative to both legal personhood and the rights of nature paradigm as the means to better include animals within the scope of legal justice. It offers the Principle of Multispecies Legality (PML) as not merely an account of animals’ legal subjectivity, but of the legal subjectivity of all those beings and entities that have – or that we might, as a democratic society, choose to recognize as having – interests. The PML holds that interests-bearing entitles one to recognition as a subject of the law, with the capacity to take legal action and have one’s interests considered impartially. In rejecting sentience as the grounds of animals' politico-legal inclusion, the PML’s account of legal subjectivity provides for animals alongside existing sentient and non-sentient legal subjects, like humans and corporations. It also leaves the door open for other valuable entities that currently lack legal subjecthood (and which may or may not be sentient), such as plants, fungi, bodies of water, and ecosystems. The chapter argues that the inclusivity of the PML is not only beneficial for animals and other non-human entities, but also for those humans whose legal subjectivity remains tenuous under existing personhood paradigms.
Meeting Details:
- Tuesday February 18, 2025
- 4:00pm - 5:00pm EST
- VIRTUAL: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/85251465364
- Meeting ID: 852 5146 5364
Serrin Rutledge-Prior is a Postdoctoral Fellow in animal ethics in the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston/Katarokwi. Previously, she was a Research Fellow at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy and, in 2024, was a visiting researcher at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law.
For further workshop information contact events.law@utoronto.ca
Image details: A lactating cow kept to supply a dairy farm family's personal dairy consumption gazes into the camera. The farmer keeps her separated from her young calf, visible in the background, to ensure the calf cannot suckle her milk. Aydin, Aydin Province, Aegean Region, Turkiye, 2023. Havva Zorlu / We Animals (WAM34306).