Beyond Rights and Welfare: Democracy, Dialogue, and the Animal Welfare Act

The primary frameworks through which scholars have conceptualized legal protections for animals—animal “rights” and animal “welfare”—do not account for socio-legal transformation or democratic dialogue as central dynamics of animal law. The animal “rights” approach focuses on the need for limits or boundaries preventing animal use, while the animal “welfare” approach advocates balancing harm to animals against human benefits from animal use. Both approaches rely on abstract accounts of the characteristics animals are thought to share with humans and the legal protections they are owed as a result of those traits. Neither offers sustained attention to the dynamics of legal change in democratic states, including the importance of public access to the facts of animal lives, opportunities for affective storytelling, and multi-faceted public deliberation. This Article offers an alternative avenue for theorizing animal legal protections, drawing on Laurence Tribe’s articulation of law as governed by an “evolving ethic,” wherein successive shifts in legal and public consensus build upon one another in ways that are dynamic and not entirely unpredictable. Drawing on feminist, critical, and relational approaches to law and social change, this Article elaborates a vision of animal law as governed by an evolving ethic wherein legal transformation is deeply connected to the public availability of particular facts of animal use, emotional storytelling, and broader social relationships and power dynamics. The evolving ethic here proposed helps us to shift our focus from a precritical understanding of rights as hard boundaries to a view of rights as a product of dynamic social relationships; and to shift our focus from welfarist balancing calculations to more open-textured dialogue. By conceiving of animal law through the lens of the evolving ethic, we can break free of stale debates about the virtue of rights versus welfare and instead embrace both as tools in a dialogic toolbox deployed in a field of legal transformation that is better characterized by dynamism and dialogue than by teleological advancement toward a predefined goal. The Animal Welfare Act (AWA)—the central legal regime governing the experimental use of animals in the United States, forms the central case study. The AWA regime in its current form works to foreclose public deliberation over concrete cases. The history of this same regime, however, demonstrates that affective storytelling grounded in the particular facts of animal use has been a major driver of democratic legal change protecting animals used in experiments. This Article explores the current structure and historical development of the AWA scheme, demonstrating that the evolving ethic offers insights, beyond those allowed by rights and welfare approaches, into the practical dynamics of animal law and the shortcomings of the current AWA scheme. Informed by the evolving ethic and the AWA’s history of sociolegal transformation, this Article offers AWA law reform proposals that aim to facilitate public deliberation grounded in the concrete facts of animal use—including the introduction of ethical merit review of proposed experiments, changes in the applicable rules of standing, and product labeling. While each proposed reform may yield incremental improvements in the treatment of laboratory animals in the immediate term, the core insight of the evolving ethic is that there is a distinct value in the potential of such proposals to nourish public conversations rooted in particular stories of animal use—conversations that are likely to spur new questions and new conversations, none of which can be fully determined in advance

Private Farms, Public Power: Governing the Lives of Dairy Cattle

It is widely assumed that laws governing dairy productioninclude substantial protection of animals’ interests—that in some way the state is regulating the treatment of farmed animals and protecting them against the worst excesses of their owners’ selfinterest. In fact, across jurisdictions in Canada and the United States, the standards governing farmed animal protection are not established by elected lawmakers or appointed regulators, but are instead primarily defined by private, interested parties, including producers themselves. As scholars of animal law have noted, this has contributed to weak and ineffectual legal protection of the interests of farmed animals. The present study will focus on a distinct, though related, difficulty arising from the de facto or de jure delegation of standard-setting authority to animal industries. Not only does this delegation result in less stringent standards, but it also works to erode crucial public law values, such as transparency, accountability and impartiality

Grounding Equality in Social Relationships: Suspect Classification, Grounds of Discrimination, and Relational Theory

This thesis considers the implications of relational theory for doctrinal debates in Canadian and American constitutional equality law, with a focus on grounds of discrimination and suspect classification. Chapter 1 sets out the fundamentals of feminist relational theory, emphasizing relational approaches to difference, equality, and rights. Chapter 2 considers the methodological implications of applying relational theory to doctrinal problems. Chapter 3 sets out the basic structure and evolution of the suspect classification inquiry in American equal protection law. Chapter 4 does the same in respect of the Canadian doctrinal approach to grounds of unconstitutional discrimination. Finally Chapter 5 ties together Canadian and American scholarly debates over the proper shape of inquiries into groups/grounds or class(ification), and suggests a framework by which the relational theory set out in Chapter 1 might help to reframe and resolve aspects of these problems as they emerge in both jurisdictions

Grounding Equality in Social Relationships: Suspect Classification, Grounds of Discrimination, and Relational Theory

This thesis considers the implications of relational theory for doctrinal debates in Canadian and American constitutional equality law, with a focus on grounds of discrimination and suspect classification. Chapter 1 sets out the fundamentals of feminist relational theory, emphasizing relational approaches to difference, equality, and rights. Chapter 2 considers the methodological implications of applying relational theory to doctrinal problems. Chapter 3 sets out the basic structure and evolution of the suspect classification inquiry in American equal protection law. Chapter 4 does the same in respect of the Canadian doctrinal approach to grounds of unconstitutional discrimination. Finally Chapter 5 ties together Canadian and American scholarly debates over the proper shape of inquiries into groups/grounds or class(ification), and suggests a framework by which the relational theory set out in Chapter 1 might help to reframe and resolve aspects of these problems as they emerge in both jurisdictions

Grounding Equality in Social Relationships: Suspect Classification, Grounds of Discrimination, and Relational Theory

This thesis considers the implications of relational theory for doctrinal debates in Canadian and American constitutional equality law, with a focus on grounds of discrimination and suspect classification. Chapter 1 sets out the fundamentals of feminist relational theory, emphasizing relational approaches to difference, equality, and rights. Chapter 2 considers the methodological implications of applying relational theory to doctrinal problems. Chapter 3 sets out the basic structure and evolution of the suspect classification inquiry in American equal protection law. Chapter 4 does the same in respect of the Canadian doctrinal approach to grounds of unconstitutional discrimination. Finally Chapter 5 ties together Canadian and American scholarly debates over the proper shape of inquiries into groups/grounds or class(ification), and suggests a framework by which the relational theory set out in Chapter 1 might help to reframe and resolve aspects of these problems as they emerge in both jurisdictions

Grounding Equality in Social Relationships: Suspect Classification, Grounds of Discrimination, and Relational Theory

This thesis considers the implications of relational theory for doctrinal debates in Canadian and American constitutional equality law, with a focus on grounds of discrimination and suspect classification. Chapter 1 sets out the fundamentals of feminist relational theory, emphasizing relational approaches to difference, equality, and rights. Chapter 2 considers the methodological implications of applying relational theory to doctrinal problems. Chapter 3 sets out the basic structure and evolution of the suspect classification inquiry in American equal protection law. Chapter 4 does the same in respect of the Canadian doctrinal approach to grounds of unconstitutional discrimination. Finally Chapter 5 ties together Canadian and American scholarly debates over the proper shape of inquiries into groups/grounds or class(ification), and suggests a framework by which the relational theory set out in Chapter 1 might help to reframe and resolve aspects of these problems as they emerge in both jurisdictions

Dairy Tales: Global Portraits of Milk and Law

Cow’s milk has enjoyed a widespread cultural signification in many parts of the world as “nature’s perfect food.”1 A growing body of scholarship, however, has challenged the image of cow’s milk in human diets and polities as a product of “nature,” and has instead sought to illuminate the political, scientific, colonial and postcolonial, economic, and social forces that have in fact defined the production, consumption, and cultural signification of cow’s milk in human societies. This emerging attention to the social, legal, and political significance of milk sits at the intersection of several fields of academic inquiry: anthropology, history, animal studies, development studies, gender studies, food studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, and more. In each of these contexts, milk is not only the product of an animal, but also a product of human social, cultural, and legal choice

Draft Genome Sequence of Kocuria sp. Strain UCD-OTCP (Phylum Actinobacteria).

Here, we present the draft genome of Kocuria sp. strain UCD-OTCP, a member of the phylum Actinobacteria, isolated from a restaurant chair cushion. The assembly contains 3,791,485 bp (G+C content of 73%) and is contained in 68 scaffolds

PhylOTU: a high-throughput procedure quantifies microbial community diversity and resolves novel taxa from metagenomic data.

Microbial diversity is typically characterized by clustering ribosomal RNA (SSU-rRNA) sequences into operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Targeted sequencing of environmental SSU-rRNA markers via PCR may fail to detect OTUs due to biases in priming and amplification. Analysis of shotgun sequenced environmental DNA, known as metagenomics, avoids amplification bias but generates fragmentary, non-overlapping sequence reads that cannot be clustered by existing OTU-finding methods. To circumvent these limitations, we developed PhylOTU, a computational workflow that identifies OTUs from metagenomic SSU-rRNA sequence data through the use of phylogenetic principles and probabilistic sequence profiles. Using simulated metagenomic data, we quantified the accuracy with which PhylOTU clusters reads into OTUs. Comparisons of PCR and shotgun sequenced SSU-rRNA markers derived from the global open ocean revealed that while PCR libraries identify more OTUs per sequenced residue, metagenomic libraries recover a greater taxonomic diversity of OTUs. In addition, we discover novel species, genera and families in the metagenomic libraries, including OTUs from phyla missed by analysis of PCR sequences. Taken together, these results suggest that PhylOTU enables characterization of part of the biosphere currently hidden from PCR-based surveys of diversity

The Phylogenetic Diversity of Metagenomes

Phylogenetic diversity—patterns of phylogenetic relatedness among organisms in ecological communities—provides important insights into the mechanisms underlying community assembly. Studies that measure phylogenetic diversity in microbial communities have primarily been limited to a single marker gene approach, using the small subunit of the rRNA gene (SSU-rRNA) to quantify phylogenetic relationships among microbial taxa. In this study, we present an approach for inferring phylogenetic relationships among microorganisms based on the random metagenomic sequencing of DNA fragments. To overcome challenges caused by the fragmentary nature of metagenomic data, we leveraged fully sequenced bacterial genomes as a scaffold to enable inference of phylogenetic relationships among metagenomic sequences from multiple phylogenetic marker gene families. The resulting metagenomic phylogeny can be used to quantify the phylogenetic diversity of microbial communities based on metagenomic data sets. We applied this method to understand patterns of microbial phylogenetic diversity and community assembly along an oceanic depth gradient, and compared our findings to previous studies of this gradient using SSU-rRNA gene and metagenomic analyses. Bacterial phylogenetic diversity was highest at intermediate depths beneath the ocean surface, whereas taxonomic diversity (diversity measured by binning sequences into taxonomically similar groups) showed no relationship with depth. Phylogenetic diversity estimates based on the SSU-rRNA gene and the multi-gene metagenomic phylogeny were broadly concordant, suggesting that our approach will be applicable to other metagenomic data sets for which corresponding SSU-rRNA gene sequences are unavailable. Our approach opens up the possibility of using metagenomic data to study microbial diversity in a phylogenetic context