⚖️ What does it mean to be a legal being beyond the spectrum of property to personhood?

In this conversation, Professor Maneesha Deckha, author of Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders, speaks to me about the urgent need to move beyond the property–personhood binary that has long structured law’s relationship with animals.

Drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and critical legal thought, she invites us to imagine legal beingness—a framework that refuses hierarchy and embraces kinship, care, and coexistence.

Professor Deckha concludes with a haunting image of farmed animals, and speaks briefly about the politics of milk, about the multispecies economies of dairy in India, and about what it would take for law to recognise animals not as commodities.

🐄✨ Listen to this conversation on Courts of the Living, wherever you get your podcasts.

🎙️Season 1 Episode 7: 'Beingness'

References:

About Professor Maneesha Deckha: https://www.uvic.ca/law/faculty-and-research/our-faculty/profiles/deckha-maneesha.php

Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders: https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487525873

Animals, Colonialism, and the Rule of Law: https://openurl.ebsco.com/EPDB%3Agcd%3A13%3A23401885/detailv2?sid=ebsco%3Aplink%3Ascholar&id=ebsco%3Agcd%3A187877960&crl=c&link_origin=scholar.google.ca

A Deeper Kindness: Animal Law & Youth Activism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kg6QcF9rWk0; https://www.uvic.ca/law/asri/index.php

Towards a Feminist Postcolonial Milk Studies by Greta Gaard : https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265807927_Toward_a_Feminist_Postcolonial_Milk_Studies

Mother Cow Mother India: A Multispecies Politics of Dairy in India by Yamini Narayanan: https://www.amazon.in/Mother-Cow-India-Multispecies-Politics-ebook/dp/B0BS47ZVNP