Beyond Law's Anthropocentrism. A Sociolegal Reflection on Animal Law and the More-than-human Turn

In this explorative paper, we examine the emerging body of scholarship that has recently started incorporating more-than-human perspectives in the nexus of law, society, and animals. While ‘more-than-human’ refers to a plurality of theoretical positions, for our purpose we take these positions to reflect the attempt to move away from human exceptionalism in favour of a multispecies account of the world, which reflects the social, political, and ethical significance of nonhuman animals. Our objectives as we investigate the potential of more-than-human law are threefold: (a) to review recent developments in legal and sociolegal research that adopt a more-than-human framework, (b) to bring this strand of more-than-human studies into conversation with animal law scholarship, and (c) to explore how sociology of law’s empirical tradition can contribute to such conversations.