It does not derive its authority, as many authors have supposed, from some logically prior discipline, whether physics, economics, or philosophy, these ultimately depend on law itself, in its fundamental expression of human intellect and purpose. Law, he holds, is inseparably connected to everything in the world that goes to make up personal identity and meaning.

Rats and mice are very much more likely to be experimented on today in biomedical research than dogs, cats, or primates. Rats and mice, however, are explicitly excluded from the federal Animal Welfare Act's protections against animal pain and suffering in a research setting. This paper is a response to an invitation to reflect on how medical and scientific researchers should think about the rats and mice they use, in light of ongoing legal developments in the human-animal relationship. The invitation (...) was extended by the Michigan Society for Biomedical Research, an organization for the promotion of biomedical research and defense of the use of animals in research. It was extended to a teacher of Animal Law at the University of Michigan Law School who was serving as the non-scientist member from the University on the University's Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee. Considerations to which attention is directed include developments in experimentation on humans paralleling and connected with developments in experimentation on animals, developments in the science of animals beyond the biomedical field, general movements in the legal treatment of animals that are not the outcome of conflicts between animal activists and research institutions, and the importance of attitude as a focus in any regulation of experimentation, animal or human. (shrink)

What did the twentieth century threaten in the deepest way? What were those who were eventually defeated at such staggering cost fighting from the start? The individual, the sacredness and value of the individual, and spirit itself, seen in us in being seen as an individual, and seen beyond us. The home in the secular world for both these, the individual and spirit, is the legal mind and the legal form of thought. The individual in modern law is a mystery (...) because its presence runs counter to the thrust of what are called modern efforts to understand the world. But it will be the legal mind - rooted in and the possession of people in circles out and out from those professionally involved with it - that can protect humanity and the rest of the sentient world from reliving the twentieth century in the twenty-first. (shrink)