Working Group Speakers: Iselin Gambert, Matthew Liebman & Elan Abrell

Working Group Speakers: Iselin Gambert, Matthew Liebman & Elan Abrell

This event features an in-progress paper titled: "Prefigurative Animal Law ". Join us to discuss their work and influence the final draft of the paper!

Light plant-based will be served.

Virtual option available via Zoom:

https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/89026104259 (Passcode: 087096)

Abstract:

For billions of nonhuman animals, life is hellish and dystopian. Every single day, hundreds of millions of animals are slaughtered and consumed by humans across the globe. Most of these animals are confined in conditions that are downright torturous. Political theorist Dinesh Wadiwel puts it succinctly: there is a war against animals.

Despite this dystopian reality, things could be different for animals: we can imagine ways of living alongside animals that recognize and respect them as striving creatures entitled to a good life, whose exploitation no longer undergirds our notions of human progress. As the late anarchist anthropologist David Graeber put it, “[t]he ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”

In this Article, we apply the emerging critical activist concept of “prefiguration” to the animal rights movement. Prefiguration names the ways that social actors experimentally actualize their ultimate vision for the world in the here and now, by acting as if things were already otherwise. In this Article, we focus on the places and spaces in which things already are otherwise for animals. Activists, scholars, educators, and lawyers are experimenting with alternative ways of relating to animals that actualize our utopian longings for connection, nonviolence, and creative play with and alongside the nonhuman world. These interventions take a wide variety of forms, including material practices of care at animal sanctuaries, the formation and protection of multispecies families, direct activism to rescue exploited animals, doctrinal advocacy in litigation and criminal defense, pedagogical experiments in law school classrooms, and art installations that frame exploitation as a future historical phenomenon whose present legality is uncanny. These “prefigurative” experiments in multi-species coexistence are the subject of this Article.

Our central thesis is that animal justice activists, lawyers, educators, and scholars are experimenting with new relational approaches to animals that prefigure a future in which humans and animals live together in multi-species communities that provide mutual aid, care, and joy. We defend this thesis by introducing the concept of “prefigurative animal law,” which applies recent scholarship on prefigurative legalities to the emerging field of animal law. We then provide a series of case studies or vignettes in which we identify manifestations of the kind of non-anthropocentric future toward which these movements yearn.

Bios:

Elan Abrell is an assistant professor of Science and Technology Studies at Wesleyan University and Coordinator of the Animal Studies Minor. He is a cultural anthropologist whose research and writing focus on human-animal interactions, scientific knowledge production, and technological innovation in the contemporary alternative protein industry. His ethnography Saving Animals: Multispecies Ecologies of Rescue and Care (University of Minnesota Press) received the 2022 Gregory Bateson Book Prize from Society for Cultural Anthropology. He was a 2017-18 Farmed Animal Law & Policy Fellow at the Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard University, as well as Visiting Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Animal Studies at New York University and a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Urban Studies Department at Queens College, CUNY.

Matthew Liebman is a professor and Chair of the Justice for Animals Program and at the University of San Francisco School of Law in San Francisco, California. Matthew is an internationally recognized expert in animal law and has published in leading law reviews on how the legal system can recognize and respect the rights of nonhumans. His writing has appeared in the Maryland Law Review, the Minnesota Law Review, Ecology Law Quarterly, the Animal Law Review, the Stanford Environmental Law Journal, and the Journal of Animal Law. He is a regular media commentator on animal law issues. He has been quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Guardian, and National Geographic. Before coming to USF, Matthew practiced law for 12 years with the Animal Legal Defense Fund, including three years as the organization’s director of litigation. At ALDF, he litigated a wide variety of animal protection issues, including cases to defend the First Amendment rights of activists and to establish fundamental legal rights for nonhuman animals. Matthew’s practical experience inspires his scholarship, which examines the socio-legal effects of law and litigation in the animal rights movement, as well as various substantive and doctrinal issues in animal law. He also teaches torts and professional responsibility.

Iselin Gambert is professor and director of the Fundamentals of Lawyering program and is the faculty co-Director of the Animal Legal Education Initiative at The George Washington University Law School in Washington, DC. In addition to the first-year Fundamentals course, Iselin teaches a seminar she designed called "Gender, Race, Species." She previously taught an interdisciplinary course in critical animal studies at Lund University (Sweden). Iselin’s scholarship spans multiple fields including language and rhetoric, critical animal studies, critical race theory, food law and policy, and feminist legal theory. She has written extensively on the subject of milk and is currently working on a trade book on the subject. She is a recipient of a 2019 Aspen Words Emerging Writer Fellowship in the Personal Essay category, and was the 2024 Vermont Law and Graduate School Distinguished Animal Law Scholar.

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