Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders
Maneesha Deckha 考察法律如何建构人—动物分界并将动物固定为财产，提出超越「人格/财产」二元对立的第三种法律主体地位——「存在性」(beingness)。融合女性主义关怀伦理、后殖民理论和批判动物研究。 Maneesha Deckha examines how law constructs the human-animal divide and fixes animals as property, proposing 'beingness' as a third legal status beyond the personhood/property binary. Draws on feminist care ethics, postcolonial theory, and critical animal studies.
Animals as Legal Beings (U of Toronto Press, 2021) argues that the legal system’s binary framework of personhood vs. property is fundamentally inadequate for animals. Deckha proposes “beingness” — a new legal subjectivity grounded in embodied vulnerability rather than cognitive capacity — as a way to contest the anthropocentric foundations of law. The book integrates feminist care tradition, postcolonial critique, and critical animal studies to envision a legal order that takes animal lives seriously without forcing them into the ill-fitting category of legal personhood.