UDTR — Radar mondial des droits de la Nature

Initiating a Non-Anthropocentric Jurisprudence: The Rule of Law and Animal Vulnerability Under a Property Paradigm

Identification

Clé publique

doi:10.29173/alr76

Auteurs

Maneesha Deckha

Année déclarée

2013

Langue déclarée

en

Type source

article

Première détection

2026-11-09T19:04:47.785892+00:00

Dernière observation des métadonnées

2026-11-09T19:04:47.785892+00:00

Dernière vérification HTTP

Non effectuée

Institutions déclarées par la source

University of Victoria

Pays d’affiliation déclarés

CA

Résumé documentaire — langue originale

This article discusses a recent Canadian entry to the accretion of legal texts which question, to various degrees, law’s anthropocentrism: the dissenting judgment of the Alberta Court of Appeal in Reece v. Edmonton (City of). Written by Chief Justice Catherine Fraser, the 162-paragraph dissent stands out in the Canadian landscape (and is impressive even in the international scene) given the existing Canadian law addressing animal issues that either regulate animals as objects and/or subordinate animal interests to human or corporate ones. This article argues that the dissent in Reece departs from the standard legal instrumentalist view of animals by providing a non-anthropocentric analysis of the animal interests at stake. The decision thus provides a new way of thinking about animals when compared to the existing Canadian jurisprudence. The dissent’s departure from the traditional anthropocentric legal view of animals is seen in three main ways: (1) the level of importance it assigns to the animal interest legally at issue by connecting it to the rule of law; (2) the respect it affords to critiques of animals’ current legal status (including the animal rights critique seeking to abolish the property status of animals and the default subordination of animal interests to human or corporate ones); and (3) the empathy and respect it gives to the individual animal at the heart of the legal dispute by recognizing her as a sentient and vulnerable being whose subjectivity matters. The cumulative effect is a judgment that not only provides the most sophisticated Canadian judicial analysis to date of the law’s relationship to animals, but impugns the traditional anthropocentric paradigm through which the law minimally responds to (some) animal suffering.

Identifiants

OPENALEX

W130761817

DOI

10.29173/alr76

Repères documentaires

Famille documentaire

Doctrine

Types déclarés par les sources

article

Entités naturelles mentionnées

Paysage

Les mentions d’entités ne constituent pas une preuve de reconnaissance juridique. La juridiction étudiée est distincte du pays d’affiliation des auteurs.

Sources

OpenAlex · Document 1 · Document 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.29173/alr76
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W130761817

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