Introduction
Animals and the Constitution: Towards Sentience-Based Constitutionalism by John Olusegun Adenitire and Raffael Fasel is an ambitious book. It does not simply ask whether constitutions might better protect animals than they currently do. Nor does it merely extend the familiar repertoire of animal law scholarship into constitutional terrain. Its wager is larger and more unsettling. The book asks what constitutionalism itself would look like if it took seriously the fact that constitutions govern not only human beings but also a vast range of sentient beings whose lives, bodies, and habitats are deeply structured by law and public power. From that starting point, Adenitire and Fasel develop what they call ‘sentience-based constitutionalism’, a model of constitutional order that would give due concern to all sentient beings governed by the state (p. 33).
The book’s organising claim is that contemporary constitutionalism suffers from a legitimacy gap. Existing constitutions are not merely anthropocentric in the broad and unsurprising sense that they are made by and for humans. Rather, they are structured around a narrower ideal type, the ‘paradigmatic’ human, understood as an adult, rational, autonomous legal and political agent. This ideal subject occupies the centre of constitutional thought and practice. Animals are excluded from it outright, while ‘non-paradigmatic’ humans, such as infants, persons with severe cognitive disabilities, and senile persons, are included only uneasily and often derivatively. The consequence is a constitutional order that claims universal authority while withholding equal concern from many of the beings whose lives it governs. The authors’ answer is not a plea for reform at the margins. It is a reconstruction of four central constitutional principles – fundamental rights; proportionality; the rule of law; and democracy – so that they can speak to the interests of all sentient beings.
This is therefore a book of constitutional theory, but it is not an exercise in abstraction for its own sake. One of its notable features is its grounded quality. Adenitire and Fasel move between jurisprudence, constitutional texts, legal theory, political philosophy, and examples from constitutional practice, drawn from a diverse range of jurisdictions, including European systems, the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and developments across the Global South. They repeatedly present their account as a ‘realistic utopia’ (Introduction, xix), borrowing Rawls’s language, to signal that sentience-based constitutionalism is meant to be normatively ambitious without becoming detached from institutional possibility.Footnote 1 In this respect, the book occupies an intriguing space. It is more systemic and reconstructive than much of the animal law scholarship.Footnote 2 At the same time, it remains more practically minded than many works of high constitutional theory. It reads as if it wants to persuade constitutional lawyers, judges, and policymakers, not only moral philosophers.
The book also enters a wider field than constitutional animal law alone. Animal law has developed across a range of normative, doctrinal, and reform-oriented approaches,Footnote 3 while a growing body of constitutional scholarship has examined how constitutional frameworks engage with animal protection.Footnote 4 What distinguishes this work is that it brings these strands into a more integrated conversation with constitutional theory, not merely by extending existing arguments into the constitutional domain, but by rethinking the structure of constitutionalism itself in light of them.
One of its important gestures is to situate animal exclusion alongside other critiques of the constitutional subject advanced by feminist, critical race, postcolonial, and environmental scholars (Introduction, xv). That move is persuasive. The image of the rational, autonomous rights-bearer has long been criticised as partial and exclusionary, and several of these traditions, particularly ecofeminist and posthuman approaches, have already challenged the human-centred boundaries of legal subjectivity. What Adenitire and Fasel add is the insistence that this critique must be taken seriously at the level of constitutional theory. If constitutionalism is being rethought in light of dependency, vulnerability, embodiment, and domination, then the continued invisibility of animals begins to look less like a conceptual necessity and more like a disciplinary blind spot.
At the same time, the book arrives in a landscape where the constitutional question for animals is no longer wholly unexplored. A growing body of scholarship has begun to examine how constitutional doctrine, interpretation, and design might be reimagined to take animal interests seriously. David Bilchitz, for instance, has explored the constitutional foundations of animal rights and the extent to which existing rights frameworks can be extended or reinterpreted to include animals.Footnote 5 Jessica Eisen has developed a vulnerability-inflected approach that situates animals within broader accounts of dependency and state responsibility,Footnote 6 while Maneesha Deckha has long challenged anthropocentric legal reason, arguing that familiar public law values, including the rule of law, need not be confined to human subjects.Footnote 7 These contributions have begun to unsettle the human-centred assumptions embedded in constitutional thought, while opening up new ways of conceptualising legal subjectivity and institutional responsibility.
The authors are therefore right to claim that a gap remains in the literature, but the gap is narrower than they sometimes suggest. The real novelty of the book lies less in identifying the need for an animal-conscious constitutional theory than in the scale and systematicity of its reconstruction. Its distinctive contribution lies in the way it brings together and rearticulates several foundational principles of constitutionalism within a single, coherent framework.
That systematicity is also what gives the book its weight. The point is not that every theoretical claim must be grounded in immediate practical application, nor that the account must be fully developed at every stage. What matters is whether the book substantially advances the conversation. It undoubtedly does. What follows, then, is an assessment of the book under three broad headings: its diagnosis of anthropocentric constitutionalism and legitimacy; its reconstruction of constitutional doctrine; and its account of institutional design, especially in relation to the rule of law and democracy.
Reconstructing the constitutional subject
The book’s first major achievement lies in its particular diagnosis of anthropocentric constitutionalism (Part I, 1). Adenitire and Fasel argue that constitutions govern animals in a robust sense. To govern, on their account, is not merely to affect interests indirectly, nor is it the same as subjecting someone to a rule as a normative addressee capable of understanding and complying with it. Animals are not ‘subjected’ to law in that sense. Nor are they merely ‘regulated’ like inanimate things. They are governed because public power exercises effective control over their lives, bodies, and habitats through legislation, licensing, inspections, administrative discretion, and direct interventions such as seizure, confinement, and killing. This is an elegant and important conceptual clarification. It helps the authors avoid a familiar objection, namely that animals cannot be constitutional subjects because they cannot understand law. The issue is not of comprehension but governance. The beings whose most basic interests are placed under structured public control have a claim to constitutional concern.
This point is tied to the book’s broader account of sentience. The authors treat sentience as the sufficient basis for intrinsic value and hence for constitutional concern (p. 35). Sentience here is not reduced to the capacity to feel pain and pleasure. It points instead to a richer experiential life, encompassing a range of emotional and affective states, including empirically supported capacities for empathy, jealousy, disgust, grief, indignation, and even love (Introduction, xiii; p. 36). This matters because the authors are not merely trying to justify protections against cruelty. They are offering a basis for constitutional worth. A being has constitutional worth if its interests are of constitutional importance, its intrinsic value demands respect, and its basic needs are protected through law. This understanding of constitutional worth is one of the book’s most important contributions because it gives conceptual form to something often left implicit in law, namely the intuition that some harms to animals are not merely regulatory failures but failures of constitutional order itself.
The associated concept of a legitimacy gap is also compelling. Adenitire and Fasel reject consent-based models of constitutional legitimacy insofar as these rest on the hypothetical consent of paradigmatic humans alone. In their place, they propose the ‘All Governed Interests Principle’, according to which constitutional legitimacy depends on whether the constitution gives due concern to the interests of all governed sentient beings (p. 55). The authors explicitly distinguish this from the All Affected Principle, which they regard as overly expansive and insufficiently tied to structures of governance.
On their account, the relevant category is not all those whose interests are affected by political decisions, but those who are subject to the authority of a given constitutional order. This distinction is intuitively appealing, as it promises to limit the scope of legitimacy claims to a determinate political community. At the same time, the difference may be less clear-cut in practice. In contexts where governance is diffuse, indirect, or transboundary, many of those whose interests are affected will also be subject, in varying degrees, to regulatory structures and institutional power. The All Governed Interests Principle may therefore risk converging with the All Affected Principle at the margins, raising the question of whether it ultimately provides a more determinate account of constitutional legitimacy, or primarily reframes it in a different vocabulary.
This is, nevertheless, a significant and carefully calibrated shift. By shifting legitimacy away from consent capacity and towards interests, the authors do not discard the value of consent where consent is possible. In fact, one of the book’s stronger moments is its insistence that respect for consent is itself one way of giving due concern to the interests of beings capable of consenting (p. 53). This prevents the argument from collapsing into anti-liberal paternalism.
This broader reorientation is mirrored in the book’s conceptual challenge to the ‘paradigmatic human’, which is equally incisive. One of its most effective strategies is to show that the prevailing constitutional subject excludes more than animals. It marginalises many humans too. This does not erase the profound differences between animals and non-paradigmatic humans, and the authors do not claim that it does. But it reveals the contingency of the rational, autonomous subject at the centre of constitutional doctrine. Once one sees how much constitutional thought already relies on legal techniques of mediation, guardianship, representation, and substituted judgement for many human beings, the claim that animals are conceptually ineligible begins to lose much of its force.
The section exposing the anthropocentric selectivity of prevailing doctrine is ambitious and often persuasive (p. 12, 27). The comparative discussion of cases such as Cecilia in Argentina, in which an orangutan was granted habeas corpus and recognised as a non-human subject of rights, and Estrellita in Ecuador, where the Constitutional Court held that wild animals are subjects of rights protected under the nation’s ‘rights of nature’ constitutional framework, is particularly instructive. It shows that constitutional practice has already begun to experiment, however tentatively, with the language of animal rights.
Yet it is also here that one of the book’s notable limitations appears. The comparative constitutional practice surveyed is thinner and more selective than the argument warrants (p. 13, 29). In particular, the book says very little about Brazil, despite the fact that it has produced some of the most developed jurisprudence, both constitutional and sub-constitutional, on animal dignity, anti-cruelty, and animals as subjects of rights.Footnote 8 This omission is not merely a matter of completeness. At several points, Brazilian case law bears directly on the book’s core claims. For instance, Supreme Court decisions have articulated biocentric interpretations of the ConstitutionFootnote 9 and formally challenged anthropocentric perspectives that deny animals’ inherent value, while lower courts have recognised animals as rights-bearers and granted them legal standing in direct connection with the constitutional animal protection provision.Footnote 10 Those developments sit precisely at the intersection of the book’s themes: rights; dignity; standing; and constitutional personhood. Their absence leaves an avoidable gap in a work otherwise so attentive to doctrinal innovation.
The omission is particularly unfortunate because it would have complicated one of the book’s more pessimistic claims, namely that existing constitutional animal protections have not fundamentally altered anthropocentric paradigms. There is truth in the authors’ caution. Symbolic constitutional provisions can be co-opted, narrowed, or underenforced. Still, the effects of constitutional recognition are not exhausted by immediate doctrinal transformation. In Brazil, constitutional animal protection has helped give rise to a jurisprudential and scholarly ecosystem in which animals are increasingly recognised as non-personal subjects of rights in both doctrine and enacted law. A more sustained engagement with Brazil would have enabled the authors to test more concretely the line between anthropocentric constitutionalism and sentience-based constitutionalism.
Fundamental rights, proportionality, and the non-instrumentalisation of animals
Part II of the book turns from diagnosis to reconstruction. Here the authors ask what familiar constitutional doctrines would look like under sentience-based constitutionalism. The argument begins with fundamental rights (p. 79). Rather than inventing an entirely separate catalogue for animals, Adenitire and Fasel argue that existing constitutional rights should be extended to them in ways that track the interests and capacities those rights protect. The rights they focus on are the right to life, the prohibition of torture or inhuman and degrading treatment, and the right to freedom.
The chapter on rights is, in some respects, the normative heart of the book (p. 92). The right to life is grounded in sentience itself. A sentient being has inherent value, and the continued existence of that individual matters for that reason. This yields both negative and positive duties. The state must not kill, or authorise the killing of, constitutional subjects. It must also protect the lives of animals under its control through legal prohibitions, enforcement, and investigation. The implication is uncompromising. Killing animals for food, clothing, entertainment, or research becomes impermissible. The discussion of torture and inhuman treatment follows a similar trajectory, with dignity extended beyond the human realm.
The argument on freedom is more nuanced (p. 104). The authors reject the view, associated with Alasdair Cochrane, that liberty is only intrinsically valuable for autonomous beings capable of forming and revising a conception of the good.Footnote 11 They point instead to human rights practice, where non-autonomous individuals continue to enjoy robust rights to liberty, albeit subject to paternalistic limitations in certain contexts, for example where restrictions on the freedom of persons with severe cognitive disabilities are considered necessary for clinical treatment or to prevent harm to themselves or others. From that, they derive a sentience-based right to freedom that protects animals against confinement and control not only instrumentally, but in some cases intrinsically.
The proportionality chapter is one of the book’s most theoretically original sections. Adenitire and Fasel argue that proportionality must be reconstructed around what they call the Non-Instrumentalization Principle (p. 120). On this view, when conflicts arise between animal and human rights, adjudication cannot be morally neutral. The very possibility of balancing presupposes a commitment to the equal inherent value of rights-holders. This rules out utilitarian approaches that would justify the sacrifice of animals for aggregate human welfare. The only legitimate goal capable of justifying the limitation of a right is the protection of the rights of others. This is a markedly Kantian account of proportionality. While concerns about proportionality’s tendency to facilitate trade-offs are well established in relation to conflicts between human interests, the authors’ more distinctive move lies in extending this critique to a framework in which animals are treated as rights- and interest-bearers of the same normative kind as humans.
This chapter deserves attention beyond animal law. It offers a serious challenge to the commonplace assumption that proportionality is merely a formal framework. By insisting on its moral presuppositions, the authors reveal that animal exclusion from proportionality analysis is not just an oversight. It reflects a prior refusal to recognise animals as rights-bearers whose claims count. Even so, questions remain. The account is normatively rigorous, but it leaves somewhat underexplored how the Non-Instrumentalization Principle would structure adjudication within a constitutional order already committed to it. If proportionality is to operate on the basis of equal inherent value, what forms of reasoning, justification, and limitation remain available to courts? How can courts resolve conflicts among rights-bearers without reverting, even implicitly, to forms of balancing that treat some interests as expendable? These are not objections, but questions about the internal dynamics of the model.
The rule of law beyond the paradigmatic human
The book’s chapter on the rule of law begins with a brilliantly chosen scene. In Jackson, a leading UK constitutional case concerning the validity of the Hunting Act 2004 and the scope of parliamentary sovereignty, judges discussed parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law at length, yet none of them considered whether the animals hunted, ridden, or used in the hunt might themselves be subjects of rule-of-law concern.Footnote 12 Horses, hounds, and foxes remained, as the authors put it, hidden in plain sight. From that starting point, Adenitire and Fasel expose the deep anthropocentrism of prevailing rule-of-law theories.
Their critique of FullerFootnote 13 (p. 142), WaldronFootnote 14 (p. 145), and AllanFootnote 15 (p. 148) is careful and, for the most part, convincing. Fuller’s formal legality is tied to guidance of conduct by rational agents.Footnote 16 Waldron’s procedural account centres on participation in hearings, argument, and reason-giving.Footnote 17 Allan’s substantive account, despite its richer moral dimension, remains anchored in autonomy and the capacity to form and pursue a conception of the good.Footnote 18 In each case, animals and many non-paradigmatic humans are excluded not incidentally but structurally. What these theories protect, ultimately, is the dignity or agency of the rational subject.
Adenitire and Fasel’s reconstruction turns on a simple but transformative shift. The basic idea of the rule of law is no longer the guidance of conduct but the restraint of arbitrary power (p. 151). That reformulation matters because vulnerability to arbitrary power is not confined to rational agents. Infants, cognitively disabled humans, and sentient animals can all be victims of power unconstrained by standards and accountability. Once the rule of law is understood in those terms, animals come into view as falling within its protective scope. This move reflects a well-established strand in rule-of-law theory, most prominently associated with Martin Krygier, who has similarly framed the rule of law in terms of the curtailment of arbitrary power and extended this concern to private as well as public actors.Footnote 19 While Adenitire and Fasel develop a closely aligned account, including an explicit application to private power, this connection is not acknowledged in the chapter, which leaves underexplored an important point of continuity with existing scholarship.
From that premise, the authors develop inclusive formal, procedural, and substantive accounts of the rule of law. The formal account requires that power over animals be regulated and non-arbitrary, whether exercised by public or private actors. The procedural account goes further by insisting on standing and legal representation for animals, allowing their interests to be vindicated through legal process. The substantive account requires that the legal standards themselves accord with justice, so that law can no longer authorise the harming of sentient beings in ways incompatible with their fundamental rights. The progression is compelling, and the authors are admirably candid about the limits of each version. A formal rule of law can coexist with terrible injustice. A procedural rule of law can still permit exploitation so long as procedures are respected. Only the substantive account closes the gap between legality and justice, and precisely for that reason it will be the most controversial.
The discussion of legal standing and representation is especially strong because it draws on concrete legal practice (p. 157). The habeas corpus litigation around Chucho the Andean bear, the failed ‘Animal Lovers’ standing case in the United States, the prosecutorial role of the NSPCA in South Africa, and civil-party mechanisms in France all show that the representation of animals in law is not an abstract fantasy. It is already being pieced together in fragmented ways. The authors’ contribution is to show that these practices should be seen not as discretionary innovations but as demands internal to an inclusive rule of law.
Again, however, Brazil could have contributed to the comparative picture with compelling illustrations. Brazilian law is unusually fertile ground for the issues the authors are discussing. It contains a constitutional animal protection clause, a long if underused statutory history of representation, and a growing body of case law recognising animals as rights-bearers capable of appearing in court through human representatives.Footnote 20 Given the chapter’s emphasis on standing as a structural barrier, Brazilian developments would have offered a particularly valuable example of how constitutional and procedural law can interact to make animal protection more judicially actionable.
There is also a more general question about how far the authors’ rule of law reconstruction can remain continuous with the tradition they invoke. The formal and procedural accounts still look recognisably like the rule of law. The substantive account, by contrast, edges close to a theory of just law or legitimate constitutional order. The authors know this, and they acknowledge that some readers will resist it (p. 167). They do offer a partial response within the chapter itself (chapter 5), insisting that requiring the law to comply with justice does not collapse the rule of law into the rule of justice, since not all demands of justice are appropriately legalised and not all features of legal ordering are dictated by justice. In this sense, the substantive account is presented as extending, rather than replacing, the core rule-of-law concern with the curtailment of arbitrariness. Even so, their engagement with the deeper objection remains limited. Their primary response is that such readers must ultimately confront the book’s earlier arguments about constitutional legitimacy and rights. That is fair enough. But it also suggests that the substantive rule-of-law chapter may be doing less independent work than it appears to at first glance. Rather than offering a fully self-standing defence of this reconceptualisation, it draws much of its force from the book’s broader normative framework. It is perhaps best read not as a self-contained argument but as the culmination of the book’s wider normative architecture, whose plausibility depends on the prior account of legitimacy developed elsewhere.
Democracy, representation, and the politics of animal inclusion
The democracy chapter extends the book’s project into especially challenging terrain. Here the authors confront a familiar sceptical trope, that taking animal rights seriously would absurdly require granting animals the vote. Their answer is careful and persuasive. Animals do not need to possess the same formal political rights as adult humans in order to have an equal right to democratic participation. What equality requires is due concern for the interests of all sentient beings governed by democratic processes (p. 170). Because animals are governed by laws and policies that structure their lives, they are part of the demos in the morally relevant sense.
This chapter is particularly valuable because it brings constitutional theory into conversation with the ‘political turn’ in animal ethics. The authors engage with Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka,Footnote 21 Alasdair Cochrane,Footnote 22 Janneke Vink,Footnote 23 Angie Pepper,Footnote 24 and others who disagree about whether animals should be seen as political patients, political agents, or something in between. Adenitire and Fasel refuse the starkness of that opposition. They accept that animals cannot meaningfully participate in formal electoral processes and therefore do not possess rights to vote or run for office. But they reject the inference that animals therefore lack political agency altogether. Animals participate politically, they argue, through informal, embodied, relational forms of agency that human representatives must learn to register rather than replace.
One of the chapter’s strongest insights is epistemic. Human representatives cannot adequately represent animals if animals have no role in the process through which their interests are identified (p. 178). Because animals do not usually communicate their interests abstractly, they need opportunities to explore and express preferences in context, that is, to encounter different options and respond to them through behaviour, choice, and interaction. Their interests become legible through these situated forms of engagement, which must be observed, interpreted, and fed into processes of representation. Participation, in this sense, does not amount to formal political inclusion, nor is it reducible to representation itself. It is the condition that makes representation epistemically credible: without such opportunities for animals to express preferences in context, representatives are left to rely on projection, generalisation, or speculation. It is therefore not just a matter of fairness but a condition of knowledge. This is a genuinely important point, and one with implications beyond animal theory. It echoes broader critiques of paternalism and substituted judgement while resisting the temptation to reduce politics to electoral procedure.
The authors also reject the view that legal mechanisms alone can do the work of democratic inclusion (p. 180). Their critique of Vink on this point is persuasive.Footnote 25 Courts matter, but they are not neutral or omnipotent. Rights constrain law and policy, but they do not guarantee that animal interests shape the framing of legislation in the first place. For that, political institutions are indispensable. The book therefore argues for an integrated approach combining legal and political mechanisms, including animal representatives, extra- and intra-parliamentary committees, and more direct democratic innovations such as ‘sentient beings’ initiatives’.
This is exciting and suggestive, but it is also the place where the book is least fully developed. The general case for animal participation is convincing. The institutional account remains more programmatic than worked through. What exactly would an animal representative owe to represented beings, and how would conflicts among animal interests be handled? How would committees tasked with representing or reviewing animal interests avoid capture or tokenism? How would ‘sentient beings’ initiatives’ interact with existing constitutional structures? The book offers promising directions, but not yet a sufficiently detailed institutional grammar. This is perhaps inevitable in a work of such wide scope, but it means that the democracy chapter reads more like an opening than a fully developed culmination.
Even so, the chapter succeeds in widening the horizon of constitutional imagination. It also usefully exposes the narrowness of constitutional democracies that present themselves as universal while excluding from concern vast classes of governed beings. In that sense, the chapter performs a valuable critical function even where its constructive proposals remain preliminary.
Strengths, omissions, and the book’s place in the literature
Taken as a whole, Animals and the Constitution is a major contribution. Its virtues are many. It is systematic without being rigid, ambitious without being fanciful, and interdisciplinary without losing its constitutional core. It makes a serious effort to reconstruct foundational public law principles rather than merely adding animals as an afterthought. It is also refreshingly unembarrassed about normative argument. The authors do not pretend that constitutional theory can be methodologically neutral where the status of sentient beings is at stake.
The book is likely to become an important reference point in the emerging literature on animal constitutionalism. It provides a centre of gravity for questions that had previously been dispersed across rights theory, public law, animal ethics, and isolated doctrinal interventions.
Its shortcomings are real but should be understood in proportion to its ambition. The comparative practice is sometimes thinner than the argument requires, above all in relation to Brazil. Some of the literature review is a little too quick in suggesting that the field lacked prior scrutiny of anthropocentric constitutionalism, when in fact scholars such as Bilchitz, Eisen, and Deckha had already opened much of that terrain. And the final institutional steps, especially in the democracy chapter, remain more sketched than defended, which may be deliberate.
There is also a deeper question about constitutional strategy. The book occasionally underestimates the extent to which existing constitutional animal protections can generate meaningful transformation, even when they fall short of sentience-based constitutionalism. Constitutional change can unfold slowly, unevenly, and through long arcs of mobilisation. It can reshape legal consciousness before it alters legal outcomes, and generate doctrinal footholds, institutional pathways, and symbolic resources that later litigation and scholarship build upon. Constitutional animal protection clauses have, in several jurisdictions, already influenced judicial reasoning, legislative interpretation, and the broader public legitimacy of animal protection claims, even where they have not displaced fundamentally anthropocentric legal structures.Footnote 26 These developments suggest that constitutional transformation does not always require a wholesale redesign of constitutional architecture, but may instead emerge through cumulative processes of interpretation, litigation, and normative contestation. At the same time, such developments still depend upon a deeper reorientation of constitutional imagination and practice, including shifts in how constitutional values, subjects, and interests are understood. In this respect, the authors’ analysis of the shortcomings of the current constitutional model might have benefited from a more dynamic engagement with the present operation of animal constitutionalism, as well as with the possibilities that constitutional animal protection clauses open up over time.
Still, this criticism cuts in a paradoxically favourable direction. It suggests that the world may already contain more constitutional openings for animals than the book sometimes acknowledges. That does not weaken sentience-based constitutionalism as a normative ideal. It may strengthen its practical plausibility.
Conclusion
Adenitire and Fasel have written a book that merits sustained attention across constitutional law and beyond, including from scholars working in other areas of law and political theory. Whether one agrees with all of its conclusions is, in a sense, secondary. The book forces a confrontation with a foundational question that constitutional theory has long evaded. If constitutions govern sentient beings other than paradigmatic adult humans, on what basis can they remain constitutionally invisible?
The answer traditionally given has been that animals are outside the community of legal and political concern because they lack the capacities associated with the constitutional subject. The great accomplishment of Animals and the Constitution is to show how unstable, selective, and normatively loaded that answer has always been. By reorienting constitutional thought around governance, vulnerability, and intrinsic value, the book reveals the familiar architecture of constitutionalism as narrower than it appears and less defensible than it claims.
The reconstruction it offers is not without its limits. Some chapters are more developed than others, certain comparative dimensions could be more fully explored, and some institutional proposals would benefit from further elaboration. Yet these features are characteristic of an ambitious work of this scope. The arguments invite engagement rather than closure and open a field for further inquiry.
Scholars across constitutional law, animal law, political and democratic theory, and related fields will now have occasion to engage with this book. Some will resist its substantive commitments. Others will reject its extension of rights language beyond the human. Still others will accept its critique of anthropocentric constitutionalism while preferring more gradual or less reconstructive paths. But none of those responses can proceed as though the old constitutional settlement were conceptually settled.
For those already persuaded that the legal status of animals raises constitutional questions, this book offers a framework of unusual breadth in the emerging field of animal constitutionalism. For those not yet persuaded, it offers something equally valuable, a clear demonstration that the exclusion of animals from constitutional thought is not a neutral starting point but a contested and contestable choice. That alone makes Animals and the Constitution a significant work. Its central provocation will linger long after the details of any particular chapter. Constitutionalism, the book insists, cannot claim legitimacy while treating so many governed beings as though they were beneath its sight. That is a claim worth arguing with, and even more worth taking seriously.
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to Matthew Perry for his helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this review essay, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers for their attentive and constructive comments. All remaining errors are mine alone.
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