Animal Rights

Summary: This article gives a brief introduction regarding the obstacles to legal rights for animals.

Summary: This article provides a review of the book "Animals, Property, and the Law."

Summary: This article was adapted from remarks from Steven M. Wise at a symposium held by the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund of Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College on September 23, 1995 regarding issues affecting domestic and captive animals.

Summary: This article was adapted from remarks from David Favre at a symposium held by the Student Animal Legal Defense Fund of Northwestern School of Law of Lewis & Clark College on September 23, 1995 regarding issues affecting domestic and captive animals.

Summary: This article gives a brief introduction of the social attitudes regarding animals as property.

Summary: A professor of law at Brooklyn Law School explains why, in the controversial Lukumi case, the Supreme Court ruled that the religious sacrifice of animals falls under the protective umbrella of the Free Exercise Clause. The author criticizes the court for abandoning the belief-action dichotomy in Free Exercise jurisprudence and places blame on the lack of protection given to animals by current laws.

Summary: The first in a series of articles by the author whose overall purpose is to explain why legal rights need not be restricted to human beings and why a handful of rights that protect fundamental interests of human beings should also protect the fundamental interests of such nonhuman animals as chimpanzees and bonobos. The second article in this series traces the development of the common law as it concerns the relationships between human and nonhuman animals from its beginnings in the Mesopotamian "law code" of the third and second millennia, B.C. until today.

Summary: The author compares John Stuart Mill's social movement theory to the animal rights movement.

Summary: This article provides an introduction into premiere issue of Animal Law.

Summary: In this Article, I contend that a belief in animal liberation qualifies as religion under the Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence of the United States Constitution. Thus, every time a prison warden, public school teacher or administrator, or government employer refuses to accommodate the ethical belief of an animal liberationist, they are infringing on that person’s religious freedom, and they should have to satisfy the same constitutional or statutory requirements that would adhere were the asserted interest based on more traditional religious exercise. One possible solution to the widespread violations of the First Amendment rights of animal liberationists would be the incorporation of a ‘Church of Animal Liberation’ under the Internal Revenue Code (as a proper church or as a religious organization). This would help to protect the free exercise rights of those who believe in animal rights because it would give them a religious organization to reference—with articles of incorporation that align with the jurisprudential definition of religion—in making their requests for religious accommodation. First, this Article discusses the constitutional definition of religion, what it means to believe in animal liberation, and animal liberation beliefs that circuit court precedent already recognizes as religious. Then, it discusses how animal liberation-based free exercise conflicts would play out in practice (e.g., identifying when infringing on the rights of animal liberationists would require strict scrutiny and when it would not). Lastly, this Article suggests that incorporating a group (e.g., a ‘Church of Animal Liberation’) as a religious organization under the Internal Revenue Code might help to secure constitutional rights for animal liberationists, and explains what would be required to incorporate such an organization.