Animal Rights Law with Raffael Fasel & Sean Butler

Do animals have legal rights? Recent court cases — from Happy the elephant in the United States to Estrellita the woolly monkey in Ecuador — have put deep questions about the ways in which animals are (not) protected by the law squarely in the public eye. A new textbook, Animal Rights Law (Bloomsbury, 2023) tells readers about this emerging field. Based on a popular course of the authors at the University of Cambridge, the book takes the reader from the earliest anti-cruelty laws to modern animal welfare laws, to recent attempts to grant basic rights and personhood to animals. To help readers understand this legal evolution, authors Raffael Fasel and Sean Butler explain the ethics, legal theory, and social issues behind animal rights and connected topics such as property, subjecthood, dignity, and human rights. In this talk, moderated by LEAP Student Fellow Thomas Poston, Fasel and Butler discussed their new volume as well as the current state and potential future of this developing legal field.