Law Commons^™

Not A Living Room Sofa: Changing The Legal Status Of Companion Animals, Susan J. Hankin

Faculty Scholarship

Although the law has traditionally treated non-human animals as property, public attitudes and many of our current laws already are beginning to reflect many ways in which animals, and especially companion animals, are fundamentally different from inanimate property. Despite these trends, the differences between animals and inanimate property need to be more clearly reflected in our laws, because there are still too many cases where the results under current laws are inconsistent with this understanding of companion animals.

This article proposes the legislative creation of a new status that formally recognizes companion animals as a distinct legal category: “companion animal …

Bred Meat--The Cultural Foundation Of The Factory Farm, David N. Cassuto

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article argues that the ability of large-scale industrial farms to commodify animals in the face of strong countervailing social forces stems in large part from the legal system’s embrace of a secularized but nonetheless deeply religious vision of human ascendancy. Within this belief system, animals comprise beings through whom we define ourselves by contrast and to whom we deny ingress to the legal system. The impulse to increase protections for nonhuman animals is offset by institutionally privileged categories of behavior that commodify nonhumans and strip them of legal defenses. The resulting lattice of laws purports to safeguard animals while …