Inaugural Animal Law Fundamentals presentation by U of T Law Professor Angela Fernandez

Animal Law Fundamentals, a free resource from the Brooks Institute, is a documentary-style series of video presentations and scholarly papers on the fundamentals of animal law by North America’s notable animal law scholars. The goal of this series is to make the fundamentals of animal law accessible to the public from premier subject matter experts. It is an orientation for anyone interested in gaining a substantive overview on an animal law subject matter quickly and effectively by listening to an academic or practicing scholar, as well as having a companion paper into which there can be a ‘deep dive.’

Animals as Property, Quasi-Property or Quasi-Person by Professor Angela Fernandez

It is often said that there are only two available legal categories for nonhuman animals, property or person. Faced with this stark choice, judges, legislators, and members of the public will likely place them in the property category. This paper proposes an in between quasi-hood status – quasi-property/quasi-personhood – that can be used to downplay the property-like qualities of nonhuman animals and augment their personhood-like ones. This status can be used for a large number of nonhuman animals, both as individuals and at a species level, as a kind of sliding scale, as human understanding and views of nonhuman animals and what we owe them change over time.

View the trailer, full presentation and accompanying paper at thebrooksinstitute.org/animal-law-fundamentals.

Additional subject matter content will roll-out over the next six months. If you would like to be notified when additional Animal Law Fundamentals content is available, visit thebrooksinstitute.org/subscribe and select the "Brooks Institute Special Announcements" checkbox upon sign-up.

Read more about Professor Fernandez's work with the Brooks Institute in Nexus