With its intricate layers of international, federal, and state protections, environmental law is more established than animal law. Yet, animal law faces many of the same legal and strategic challenges that environmental law faced in seeking to establish a more secure foothold in the United States and abroad. As such, animal law stands to gain valuable insights from the lessons of the environmental law movement.
In the Second Edition of this book, Prof. Randall S. Abate, the inaugural Rechnitz Family and Urban Coast Institute Endowed Chair in Marine and Environmental Law and Policy at Monmouth University, has assembled an experienced team of 36 academics, advocates, and legal professionals from the environmental and animal law fields to examine the experiences of these two fields. Drawing on lessons from history, politics, and law, the 29-chapter book examines how environmental law’s successes and shortcomings can inform animal law, and how the two fields can work together to secure mutual gains in the future.
Highlights from the Second Edition
- Three new chapters addressing how food law and policy can be a valuable mechanism for enhanced protection of animals. Coverage includes consumer protection litigation involving false advertising claims, industry challenges to plant-based meat and milk, and animal and environmental law and policy considerations concerning lab-grown meat.
- Expanded coverage of cutting-edge procedural topics with three new chapters on impact assessment, enforcement, and regulatory avoidance. Expanded coverage of climate change with two new chapters addressing innovative proposals for enhanced protection of animals in the face of this crisis.
- New chapters on a range of pressing themes at the intersection of animal and environmental law and policy including rights of nature, greenwashing and humane washing, animal testing, and an emerging area known as “animal socioequality.”
Conceived and curated with great thoughtfulness by Professor Abate, this unique book was already impressive and invaluable in its original edition. The new edition vastly expands and updates the volume’s contents, making it a truly unmatched resource at the intersections of animal and environmental law.
—Douglas A. Kysar
Deputy Dean, Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law, and Faculty Co-Director of the Law, Ethics & Animals Program,
Yale Law School
This important book is long overdue. No one can reasonably deny that animals are part of the environment yet, for far too long, many have denied the interrelatedness of animal law and environmental law. Professor Abate has assembled a formidable group of authors who demonstrate with clarity and precision that solving the environmental crisis will involve recognizing that animal law and environmental law are one.
— David Cassuto
Professor of Law and Director, Brazil-American Institute for Law and Environment, Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University
Prof. Randall S. Abate’s volume mobilizes an incredible array of expertise to inform ways forward to protect animals through law. The urgency for this has never been more profound: reshaping our relationships with animals is the key to address global challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss and zoonotic pandemics, as well as doing justice to the creatures with whom we share this planet.
— Dirk-Jan Verdonk
Director, World Animal Protection Netherlands, and author of Het Dierloze Gerecht and Dierenrechten
The burgeoning field of Animal Law is charting new territory by challenging the anthropocentrism that pervades the legal system and calling for legal consideration of nonhuman worlds. But it’s not the first legal movement to do so. Professor Abate has done important work to bring the lessons learned from decades of environmental law to the animal law community, collecting articles from the sharpest minds in these overlapping but distinct fields. What Can Animal Law Learn From Environmental Law? The answer is: a lot.
—Matthew Liebman
Justice for Animals Chair and Associate Professor of Law, University of San Francisco School of Law
Professor Abate has assembled a number of experts to examine how the animal law field can utilize the environmental law field’s winning playbook. Some of environmental law field’s successful strategies include having a cohesive, national presence, using scientific data to drive change, encouraging transparency of government information, building strong legal and regulatory frameworks and using grassroots advocacy to effect change. In analyzing those and other successful strategies, the book actually exceeds its original purpose by also being valuable to the environmental law field as well. Quite simply, I don't think there's anyone in either the environmental law or animal law fields who wouldn't benefit from reading this book.
—Leslie Rudloff, Esq. LL.M.
Senior Staff Attorney, Farm Sanctuary
The law is rapidly evolving to see at least some nonhuman animals and parts of the environment as "legal persons." While this may strike some as a lawyerly fetish with little real-world ramifications, the potential for positive change enabled by this shift in thinking is enormous. This book will be a go-to resource for students and practitioners keen to continue this evolution and ensure that it lives up to its promise, namely, to make the law better reflect scientific reality as well as the shared values which make all life on earth possible, and to move beyond the idea that man is the measure of all things, in law or anywhere else.
—Kevin R. Schneider, Executive Director, Nonhuman Rights Project
As a lawyer advocating for animals in a country where the field of animal law is still in the early stages of development, I found this book to be an invaluable tool. Through its comprehensive and expert analysis, it prepares legal professionals to be inclusive and preemptive in their efforts, which is critical in this challenging arena. Not only does it highlight key fundamental challenges that must be addressed, it also provides practical and adaptable solutions that can be utilized to effect meaningful change.
—Amy P. Wilson (BCOM, LLB, LLM),
Director & Founder – Animal Law Reform South Africa; Aquatic Animal Law Initiative Fellow – Lewis & Clark Law School
Professor Abate’s second edition of his important original work is a vital resource for those seeking to build upon the successes of the environmental law movement to support the parallel progress of animal law. This new edition, informed by several recent landmark legal developments, brings together even more scholars at the forefronts of their fields to provide constructive and practicable ideas, examples, and strategies that should be in every advocate’s library.
—Courtney G. Lee
McGeorge School of Law Faculty; 2019 Chair, AALS Section on Animal Law
This is an important book. Unusually, it seeks to bring animal law into direct conversation with environmental law, highlighting why it is that they have developed as two distinct fields of practice, and how one could support the evolution of the other. It is U.S.-focused and includes observations and lessons that could be applied to other jurisdictions globally, as well as opening up space for wider debate as both movements grow around the world. Students, practitioners, and researchers will benefit equally from this book.
—Dr. Yoriko Otomo
Director of the Global Research Network, Research Associate, SOAS Law School, University of London
The relationship between the environmental law movement and the animal law movement is close, but intensely complex. Nowhere is the fascinating connection better exemplified than in this collection of exceptionally informative essays.
—Jackson Walkden-Brown
Centre for Professional Legal Education, Bond University, Queensland, Australia
This book offers readers an incredible opportunity to understand the connections between environmental law and animal law. Written by authors having different backgrounds and experiences, the book allows the reader to better focus on the mutual contribution that each discipline can give to the other despite their different — if not occasionally clashing — priorities. The contributions from distinguished scholars and practitioners from all over the World provide a global dimension and relevance to the topics considered, and the book’s comparison of legal solutions and strategies will surely contribute to the improved regulation and protection of the environment and of nonhuman beings.
—Diana Cerini
Full Professor of Comparative Private Law, University of Milano Bicocca, Italy