Maneesha Deckha, Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (2021, University of Toronto Press)
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Reviewed by Rimona AfanaThe legal status of nonhumans has been hotly debated in academia, activism, and in courts over the past decades.Arguments have oscillated primarily between the property and personhood approaches (and their associated welfarist and abolitionist drives), which both come with ethical, legal, and practical challenges.Animals as Legal Beings introduces a different approach, centered on beingness, opposing the use and abuse which accompany the property approach while also transcending the anthropocentrism marking personhood."Beingness thus offers a theoretical innovation as well as a practical solution to evading the impasse that currently encapsulates the core debate in animal law circles." 1 To sketch beingness as a new legal category, Maneesha Deckha draws on feminist animal care theory, postcolonial feminist scholarship, and critical animal studies.While scholars across different disciplines informed the book, the works of Carol Adams, Josephine Donovan and Gary Francione are specified as foundational to the analysis.Animals as Legal Beings seeks "a new, transformative legal status or subjectivity" 2 for animals, by integrating insights from critical theory into animal law, which remains dominated by a liberal, anthropocentric ethos.At the heart of Deckha's project is a sentiment shared by many critical legal scholars: the law, particularly legal systems rooted in the Western liberal humanist tradition, is shaped by hierarchies when it comes to class, gender, ability, race, species, and other identity markers.The sociolegal treatment of these differences-turned-hierarchies generates structures of power, which in turn lead to violence, which can only be properly understood intersectionally.The condition of nonhumans and our fight for their rights are contextualized by Deckha within these multi-layered biological, cultural, political, legal dynamics.Thus, 1 Maneesha Deckha, Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders (University of Toronto Press 2021) 9. 2 Ibid 6.concepts such as human, animal, animality or personhood need to be situated within the constraints of the liberal legal tradition.The deficiency of current animal laws is not the starting point of the analysis here; the law itself is.Deckha challenges the paradigmatic subject in liberal legalism: an independent, autonomous, rational, disembodied (in the sense that the fragility of our corporeality is not factored in) individual.This observation has been previously made by other theorists: I will only mention here the pioneering work of Martha Fineman, with whose Vulnerability Initiative I was previously affiliated.Fineman's vulnerability theory 3 , applied to a range of sociolegal issues, replaces this ideal(ized) legal subject with a version much closer to the reality of our human condition: embodied rather than disembodied, dependent and interdependent rather than autonomous, and vulnerable throughout our life span.Deckha embraces a similar notion of the actual (not ideal) legal subject when it comes to nonhumans.This approach is not new: over a decade ago, Ani Satz theorized animals as vulnerable subjects.4 Part 1, "Beyond Property and Personhood: Contesting Legal Objectification and Humanization" reviews the property/personhood debate, highlighting the shortcomings of both approaches.Part 2, "Animals as Beings: In Pursuit of a New Post-Anthropocentric Legal Order" posits beingness as an alternative legal category.Chapter 1, "No Escape: Anti-cruelty Laws' Property Foundations", covers the welfarist approach in Canada, similar to that in other legal systems rooted in British common law, which sustain human exceptionalism.Looking at Canada's Criminal Code and at a range of cases showing how anti-cruelty laws have been applied, Deckha concludes that animal protection laws rooted in the property approach are self-defeating, as they cannot adequately protect animals.Cruelty is framed in a narrow way, typically limited to the most severe of cases and usually victimizing companion animals.Cruelty routine in organized forms of animal (ab)use (sectors like food, clothing, research, 3 Martha A. Fineman, The Autonomy Myth: A Theory of Dependency (The New Press 2004); Martha
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Prédiction machine sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Le volet Gemma est une étiquette directe du modèle pour chaque travail de la base, lue sur la notice réduite au titre. Le volet Codex est un classifieur appris des 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et calibré sur les taux pondérés de l'échantillon; les champs sans appui suffisant ne portent aucun appel Codex. Le mode candidate est l'union des deux volets; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont pas des étiquettes humaines.
Scores du classifieur distillé par catégorie (deux têtes)
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,002 | 0,008 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,001 | 0,001 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,001 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,003 | 0,005 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,005 | 0,008 |
| Communication savante | 0,007 | 0,008 |
| Science ouverte | 0,002 | 0,002 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,015 | 0,008 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,016 | 0,004 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule source (Gemma direct ou Codex distillé), pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».