The Animal Law and Policy Institute at Vermont Law and Graduate School is pleased to announce that Professor Angela Fernandez will be joining us this summer as our first Animal Law and Policy Distinguished Scholar. While VLGS has welcomed environmental law scholars and animal law media fellows through the Distinguished Scholars and Fellows program in the past, we are thrilled to provide this new opportunity for animal law faculty.
Angela Fernandez is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto with a cross-appointment in the Department of History. Her research focuses on a particular style of legal history called "legal archaeology," including a book-length study on an (in)famous first possession property case involving a fox: Pierson v. Post, the Hunt for the Fox: Law and Professionalization in American Legal Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Professor Fernandez is interested in animals and the law. She is a member of the Scholars Committee of the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights, Law & Policy and the collaborative research network BASAN (Brooks Animal Studies Academic Network). She sits on the Board of Advisors and is a Director of Animal Justice Canada. She is also a fellow with the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.
In addition to "Animals and the Law" (taught in the Fall of 2021 and 2022) and her legal history seminar ("Legal Archaeology: Studies of Cases in Context"), Professor Fernandez teaches Contracts. She is also the Chair of the Directed Research Program and is interested in supervising students on animal law and legal history topics.
Professor Fernandez is the inaugural scholar in the "Brooks U" series, "Fundamentals of Animal Law," where you can find a copy of her paper "Animals as Property, Quasi-Property or Quasi-Person" and an accompanying video. She can also be seen speaking about this topic at a public lecture at New York University, Yale Law School's Law, Ethics and Animals Program (LEAP), and the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law series Talking Animals, Law & Philosophy.
Her current scholarship builds upon her previous work on the quasi-property/quasi-personhood status of nonhuman animals. She interrogates the focus in animal law scholarship on sentience, asking if we might do better to focus on other qualities animals share with the more-than-human or other-than-human such as the quality of movement or movability. She also contrasts these ideas about the power and significance of movement from Indigenous cosmologies to Western European concepts.
She will be presenting, "Animals as Property, Quasi-Property or Quasi Person" as part of the Hot Topics Lecture Series on Tuesday, June 27 at 12:00 pm (ET).
We are looking forward to building upon our past collaborations with Professor Fernandez while she visits Vermont Law and Graduate School this summer.