This module offers us the opportunity to think deeply and critically using a justice perspective about animal welfare, rights, and interests. Engaging philosophy, history, and ecology, this module encourages us to question and analyse the treatment, protection, and exploitation of different types of animals via law. This module is a response to the development of a growing animal law movement, as well as critical multi-species and posthuman theories and activism. The aim is to encourage us to discuss, in depth, the extent to which justice and ethics should inform human-animal relations, with a view to developing different forms, structures, and subjects of law.  In this course, you will debate legal personhood of animals and rejection of their property status.  Working beyond traditional justice-based approaches, and based on critical feminist analysis, we will also think about care-based approaches and how legal interventions and frameworks can give animals the spaces to flourish through re-wilding and nature conservation.

Your learning on this module arises from applying justice-based arguments to analyse legal frameworks relating to different categories of animals: farmed animals, companion animals (pets), animals living in the wild and endangered animals, and animals in science.  This module structure is designed to encourage your critical thinking about the differential legal and cultural treatment of categories of animal, the impact of legal categorization, and the intersection of different regulatory regimes.

The legal analysis in this module is rooted in UK and EU law, but, adopting a comparative approach, this will be enriched by analysis of legal developments in a range of jurisdictions.  The module begins by encouraging our understanding of the scale and nature of harm to animals in the Anthropocene.  We consider classification of animals, debates on sentience, flourishing, capacity and vulnerability.  Applying concepts of justice, equality and fairness to animals, we locate animal justice alongside, and intertwined with, the broader environmental justice movement.  We finish the module by discussing legal personhood for animals, representing animals in public policy and litigation, animal welfare and rights and the prospects of law reform.

By encouraging you to think deeply and critically about animal justice, the elements of transformative learning in this module will give you different perspectives on your relationship to animals as well as equipping you for future study and/or legal practice in this emerging field.