Braverman’s new book highlights the ‘lively’ dimensions of law

UB faculty member Irus Braverman’s continuing interest in the intersection of animals and the law has produced a new edited volume: Animals, Biopolitics, Law: Lively Legalities (Routledge).

The book, which follows last year’s publication of Braverman’s Wild Life: The Institution of Captivity (Stanford University Press), grew out of a 2014 Baldy Center workshop, “More-than-Human Legalities: Advocating an Animal Turn in Law,” which Braverman, a professor in the UB Law School, organized.

Typically, Braverman says, the legal investigation of nonhuman life — and of animal life in particular — is conducted through the discourse of animal rights. Within this discourse, legal rights are extended to certain nonhuman animals through the same liberal framework that has afforded human rights before it. Animals, Biopolitics, Law envisions the possibility of “lively legalities” that move beyond the traditional animal-rights framework.

The volume, she writes in her introduction, “asks what, in general terms, it means to be human and nonhuman, what it means to govern and be governed, and what are the ethical and political concerns that emerge from the project of governing human as well as more-than-human life. While the contributors take nonhuman animals as a departure point, they recognize that the questions articulated above also apply to non-animal life forms, aggregations of life, and ecological processes. Drawing on a vast array of expertise — from law, geography, and anthropology, through animal studies and post-humanism, to science and technology studies — the contributors consider the vast possibilities of lively legalities.”

The book comprises 10 essays, written by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including law, geography, anthropology and environmental history. Each of the essays explores a different law-animal intersection, ranging from jellyfish management to crow kill ceremonies, and from rewilding efforts in the Netherlands through e-coli management in the United Kingdom, to snakes as family members in Texas. Acclaimed scholar Cary Wolfe, author of Before the Law (2012), contributed a foreword to the book and legal geographer David Delaney wrote the afterword.

In addition to her introduction, Braverman contributed a chapter entitled “The Regulatory Life of Threatened Species Lists,” where she explores the priority rankings established by endangered species lists such as the IUCN Red List and how they render certain species’ lives more valuable than others, resulting in what Michel Foucault refers to as “make live” and “make die.”

Braverman has been teaching at the UB Law School since 2007, and is currently interviewing coral scientists from around the world for her next book, which explores coral legalities and the plight of the oceans. She also is exploring new territories as she expands her interests to researching bacterial life and the meaning of the new gene editing technology CRISPR/Cas 9 for nonhuman life.