Animals as Legal Beings is a new and important monograph-length treatment on the inadequacies of both a property and a personhood approach to the legal status of nonhuman animals. In line with decades of literature arguing for the abolishment of the property status of animals, Professor Maneesha Deckha, Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, adds a novel twist: personhood, the typically preferred alternative to a property status for nonhuman animals, is not a (...) good option. Why? Deckha argues that personhood is too anthropocentric and too embedded in problematic Western liberal humanist traditions to work for nonhuman animals. Drawing on a truly impressive... (shrink)

In this article, I review A Theory of Legal Personhood, explaining what I see as its key contributions to animal law scholarship, while situating it against wider jurisprudential contributions that may be of interest to philosophers and legal scholars grappling with the oft-thorny idea of legal personhood, not just for nonhuman animals but for corporations, artificially intelligent machines, and late-term fetuses. The article will explain Kurki's “bundle” theory of legal personhood as a “cluster” concept and analyze the extremely helpful parsing (...) his theory provides in terms of the active and passive “incidents” of legal personhood. I focus much of the piece on Kurki's view of legal “nonpersons” who nonetheless have some rights or incidents of personhood in order to help clarify the challenge Kurki's theory raises for Steven M. Wise and the Nonhuman Rights Project, as the issues surrounding those litigation efforts will likely be familiar to readers here, who will be wondering how this theory interacts with what Wise seeks to achieve. (shrink)