| Description |
This dissertation interrogates competing rhetorics of animal rights law within the U.S. American legal system. It critiques legal discourses that undermine an ultimate goal of total liberation across species lines and offers an alternative way of knowing/critiquing/practicing animal rights legal discourse. Chapter 1 situates this dissertation within a U.S. American context. It offers a microhistory of animal law; clarifies distinctions between a "welfare" and "rights" approach; highlights diversity issues within the animal rights movement; defends "the law" as a liberatory arena; and argues that animal liberationists must grapple with their own ideological insufficiencies to promote justice. Chapter 2 advocates for Ecofeminist Legal Theory, defined through principles drawn from ecofeminism, feminist legal studies, and critical animal studies. Methodologically, it invokes ideological rhetorical criticism. Chapter 3 interrogates Steven Wise's Nonhuman Rights Project. It commends Wise's critique of animals' legal "thing-hood" under the Rule of Law and his call for the "legal personhood" of certain animals. However, the colonial tenor of Wise's rhetoric is based on troubling preferences for cognitive prowess and sufficient similarity. Chapter 4 examines animal rights advocate and lawyer Gary Francione, inventor of "vegan abolitionism." The abolitionist stance is a more complex approach to animal law that bases legal personhood in sentience alone and promotes veganism as a moral baseline. However, Francione remains bound to troubling colonial conceptions of a iv "good" body. Chapter 5 investigates Earth Jurisprudence, a legal paradigm drawn from radical environmentalist thought. It would grant personhood to animals, plants, and even natural objects. I commend Earth Jurisprudence for its ecocentric approach to law but problematize both its lack of pragmatism and its strategic pivoting from questions relating to animals that fall outside visions of pristine wilderness. Chapter 6 offers an alternative approach to rhetorical criticisms of animal rights law: a Vegan Ontology. It appropriates "the good" from previous chapters and puts them in conversation with ecofeminist legal principles. It advocates for pro-animal judicial decisions at the highest possible institutional levels and for grassroots activism that encourages shifts in everyday discourse about interspecies justice. |
