Technics and Polemics in the Project of Non-human Rights

View/ Open
File version
Accepted Manuscript (AM)
Author(s)
Mussawir, Edward
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2017
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This article examines the use of technics and polemics within contemporary animal rights discourse. It focuses on the Nonhuman Rights Project, a group which is currently engaged in litigation in the United States aimed at having a non-human animal recognized by the courts as a person and subject of rights. Turning to the work of the late legal historian Yan Thomas, this article explores the degree to which the categories of person and thing have tended to become sacralized in the modern discourse of animal rights in order to refashion them at a polemical and metaphysical level. This is then contrasted with the work of Roman ...
View more >This article examines the use of technics and polemics within contemporary animal rights discourse. It focuses on the Nonhuman Rights Project, a group which is currently engaged in litigation in the United States aimed at having a non-human animal recognized by the courts as a person and subject of rights. Turning to the work of the late legal historian Yan Thomas, this article explores the degree to which the categories of person and thing have tended to become sacralized in the modern discourse of animal rights in order to refashion them at a polemical and metaphysical level. This is then contrasted with the work of Roman jurisprudence which, in Thomas’s account, was capable on the contrary of filing its metaphysical categories back within the narrow technical world of the civil law. The history of legal categories reveals in this sense some of the tensions which today beset the discourse of rights in relation to the non-human.
View less >
View more >This article examines the use of technics and polemics within contemporary animal rights discourse. It focuses on the Nonhuman Rights Project, a group which is currently engaged in litigation in the United States aimed at having a non-human animal recognized by the courts as a person and subject of rights. Turning to the work of the late legal historian Yan Thomas, this article explores the degree to which the categories of person and thing have tended to become sacralized in the modern discourse of animal rights in order to refashion them at a polemical and metaphysical level. This is then contrasted with the work of Roman jurisprudence which, in Thomas’s account, was capable on the contrary of filing its metaphysical categories back within the narrow technical world of the civil law. The history of legal categories reveals in this sense some of the tensions which today beset the discourse of rights in relation to the non-human.
View less >
Journal Title
Law, Culture and the Humanities
Copyright Statement
© 2017 Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. This is the author-manuscript version of this paper. Reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher. The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Law, Culture and the Humanities, Mar 2017 by SAGE Publications Ltd, All rights reserved.
Note
This publication has been entered into Griffith Research Online as an Advanced Online Version.
Subject
Animal law
Legal theory, jurisprudence and legal interpretation