This is an open access book.Animals are the traditional blind spot in human rights theory. This book brings together the seemingly disparate discourses of human and animal rights, and looks at emerging animal rights as new human rights. It approaches the question whether animals can and should have human rights through a comprehensive review of contemporary human rights philosophy, discussing both naturalistic and political justifications of human and animal rights. On philosophical as well as practical grounds, this book argues that there are compelling conceptual, principled, and prudential reasons for modernizing the human rights paradigm and integrating animals into its protective mandate. Moreover, this book proposes the novel One Rights approach as a new (post-)human rights paradigm for the Anthropocene. One Rights advances a holistic understanding of the indivisibility and interdependence of human and animal rights. This book explores how the systematic subjugation, exploitation, and extermination of animals simultaneously contributes to some of the gravest social and environmental threats to human rights, such as animalistic dehumanization and climate change. This book submits that, in light of their socio-political and ecological interconnectedness, human and animal rights are best protected in concert. The themes of this book are part of a larger conversation about postanthropocentric legal paradigms emerging in the Anthropocene. For human rights to survive in this era of anthropogenic crises, we need to abandon the toxic ideology of human exceptionalism and embrace a more inclusive version of (post-)human rights that tends to the nonhuman. This book intends to show that a holistic One Rights approach promises to achieve better rights-protective outcomes for humans, animals, and their shared planetary home.

Do animals have legal rights? This pioneering book tells readers everything they need to know about animal rights law. Using straightforward examples from over 30 legal systems from both the civil and common law traditions, and based on popular courses run by the authors at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights, 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, it explains the ethics, legal theory, and social issues behind animal rights and connected topics such as property, subjecthood, dignity, and human rights. The book's companion website (bloomsbury.pub/animal-rights-law) provides access to briefs on the latest developments in this fast-changing area, and gives readers the tools to investigate their own legal systems with a list of key references to the latest cases, legislation, and jurisdiction-specific bibliographic references. Rich in exercises and study aids, this easy-to-use introduction is a prime resource for students from all disciplines and for anyone else who wants to understand how animals are protected by the law.

This book explores the movement towards the recognition of animal sentience in the law. It explores some first principles underpinning the recognition of animal sentience, including the nature and scope of sentience provisions, the connection between sentience and empathy, drafting issues, and the relationship between sentience recognition and animal rights. The book highlights the operation of animal sentience provisions in several jurisdictions throughout the world and considers some sector-specific applications and limitations of animal sentience recognition. The first book of its kind, it draws together different perspectives as to what this novel turn in the law might mean and where it might lead. The chapters provide a full picture of what the recognition of animal sentience might entail for humans, animals, and our environment, as well as the experiences of different legal jurisdictions in pursuing recognition of animal sentience. This collection is an essential read for both practitioners and academics alike, as well as any group seeking to advance the interests of non-human animals.

This book offers a sustained analysis of the fundamental rights of humans and nonhuman animals. It pioneers a new approach that focuses on species membership rather than individual capacities to challenge an orthodox view in scholarship on the rights of animals.

Animal Lives Matter provides a comprehensive analysis of the legal, philosophical, and ethical aspects of animal rights. It argues that the subject extends beyond the matter of our obligations towards animals, to include our wider responsibilities for protecting the environment. Drawing on numerous moral, political, legal, religious, and philosophical theories including utilitarianism, deontology, rights theory, social contractarianism, and the capabilities approach, the author meticulously examines the questions of sentience, speciesism, personhood, and human exceptionalism. Lucid, nuanced, and academically rigorous, this important book will be an essential resource for scholars of law, politics, philosophy, ethics, as well as policy makers and the general reader.

This book addresses one of today’s most urgent issues: the loss of wildlife and habitat, which together constitute an ecological crisis. Combining studies from different disciplines such as law, political science and criminology, with a focus on animal rights, the chapters explore the successes and failures of the international wildlife conservation and trade treaties, CITES and the BERN Convention. While these conventions have played a crucial role in protecting endangered species from trade and in the rewilding of European large carnivores, the case studies in this book demonstrate huge variations in their implementation and enforcement across Europe. In conclusion, the book advocates for a non-anthropocentric policy approach to strengthen wildlife conservation in Europe.

The Individual in International Law collects the work of esteemed scholars to examine the effects of humanisation on international law, and how individual status, rights, and obligations have changed the international legal system throughout history and into the present day.

Shifts across the corpus of international law have brought the international legal system into a closer alignment with the interests of the individual. This has led to a great and growing interest in the roles and status of individuals in international law, and provided new impulses for debate. The Individual in International Law is an exploration of what is described as the humanisation of international law. It examines how international law has accommodated individuals, and how individual status, rights, and obligations have become denser and more important in the international legal system. Split into two parts, the book analyses the humanisation of international law in different historical periods and from various theoretical perspectives. The first part focuses on the historical evolution of international law, exploring how the interests of individuals have shaped the development of the legal system from antiquity to 1945, providing a counterpoint to State-centric readings of international law's history. The second part contains theoretical debates, critical approaches, and interdisciplinary investigations, offering perspectives from ius positivism and ius naturalism, Marxism, TWAIL, feminism, global law, global constitutionalism, law and economics, and legal anthropology. The book aims to stimulate further research on the humanisation and dehumanisation of new fields ranging from the ius contra bellum to climate law. The editors' introduction and conclusion frame the contributions, draw together their findings, and address critiques comprehensively. Written by a team of acknowledged experts in their fields, this volume elucidates how the interests, rights, obligations, and responsibilities of individuals have shaped international norms and regimes, and suggests how a reoriented transformative humanism can inform and develop international law in an era of profound ideological, ecological, and technical challenge. This is an open access title. It is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International licence. It is available to read and download as a PDF version on the Oxford Academic platform.

Adopting an evolutionary perspective, this Research Handbook presents novel and cutting-edge insights into the interdisciplinary field of legal evolution. Engaging with various scientific approaches, it provides a versatile analysis of legal evolution, examining the field as a whole as well as in the context of specific branches of law.

This book is a collection of speculative judgments that, along with accompanying commentaries, pursue a novel enquiry into how judges might respond to the formidable and planetary-scaled challenges of the Anthropocene. The book’s contributors –from Australia, Asia, Europe, and the United Kingdom –take up a range of issues: including multispecies justice, the challenges of intergenerational justice, dimensions of postcolonial justice, the potential contribution of AI platforms to the judgment process, and the future of judging and law in and beyond the Anthropocene. The project takes its inspiration from existing critical judgment projects. It is, however, thoroughly interdisciplinary. In anticipating future scenarios, and designing or adapting legal principles to respond to them, the book’s contributors have been assisted by climate scientists with expertise in future modelling; they have benefitted from the experience of fiction writers in future worldbuilding; and they have incorporated elements of the future worlds depicted in various texts of speculative fiction and artworks. The judgments are, of necessity, speculative and hypothetical in their subject matter. Thus, taken together, they constitute a collaborative experiment in creating the inclusive and radical imaginaries of the future common law. The Anthropocene Judgments Project will appeal to critical and sociolegal academics, scholars in the environmental humanities, environmental lawyers, students, and others with interests in the pressing issues of ecology, multispecies justice, climate change, the intersection of AI platforms and the law, and the future of law in the Anthropocene.