Animals are unfortunately an afterthought in legal systems that have been developed to adjudicate the claims of humans and corporate entities. For those of us determined to extend the scope of justice to include animals, we must ask how to reshape our legal institutions to ensure that animal interests are considered alongside those of other, existing legal subjects. In this groundbreaking work, Serrin Rutledge-Prior departs from those who have proposed to extend legal personhood to animals, which in practice has proven to be exclusionary and inconsistently applied by the courts. Instead, Rutledge-Prior offers a new principle to ground legal inclusion based on a principle of multispecies legality that extends legal subjecthood to anyone – human or nonhuman – who possess interests.

Winner, 2025 Award to an Early Career Researcher, Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand

‘It is refreshing to encounter a work that, in style, intelligence, and argumentative clarity, stands comfortably alongside the classical texts of animal law and theory, yet approaches ‘the question of the animal’ in a fundamentally novel way, drawing on the debates and insights developed in recent decades. ‘Multispecies Legality’ offers a genuinely fresh theoretical contribution - well researched, clearly explained, and persuasively argued.’

Eva Bernet Kempers - Jurisprudence: An International Journal of Legal and Political Thought

‘What do you get if you mix the last two decades of animal political theory with contemporary animal law? The answer to this question must be something along the lines of Multispecies Legality: Animals and the Foundation of Legal Inclusion by the promising new voice Serrin Rutledge-Prior. And the mix does not disappoint. It is a rare pleasure to encounter a work that both advances the field, and invites the reader into a genuinely fresh line of thinking. … It is refreshing to encounter a work that, in style, intelligence, and argumentative clarity, stands comfortably alongside the classical texts of animal law and theory, yet approaches “the question of the animal” in a fundamentally novel way, drawing on the debates and insights developed in recent decades. Multispecies Legality offers a genuinely fresh theoretical contribution – well researched, clearly explained, and persuasively argued. … [It] provides not only a distinctive theoretical intervention but also a welcome incentive for the next phase of reflection, in which we bridge the gap between aspirational theoretical innovations and the (quite distinct) actual day-to-day legal realities that animal lawyers are dealing with on the ground.’

Serrin Rutledge-Prior Source: Jurisprudence