US law professor and animal rights philosopher speaks live in Ireland for the first time.

national | rights, freedoms and repression | press release Monday July 20, 2009 17:31 by RogerYates

The key event of the “Animal Rights July” programme takes place at UCD on Wednesday 22nd July, 2009.

Gary L. Francione, Distinguished Professor of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University School of Law, Newark, USA (see full bio below), will give a lecture on ‘The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation’ at 7pm, Theatre ‘L’, UCD (Newman building). This interactive lecture, in which audience members can ask questions after the principal address, will be held live via satellite* from the USA.

Gary L. Francione is the intellectual leader of the ‘abolitionist approach’ to animal rights and is the most important scholar writing about human-nonhuman relations at the present time. His most recent book, Animals as Persons (2008) is the latest in a body of work, begun in the 1990s, in which he sets out his vision of animal rights. At its core, the abolitionist approach to animal rights argues that nonhuman animals have the right not to be the property of human beings.

Francione argues that their property status renders animal welfare attempts to regulate the use of animals (as food, scientific models, items of clothing, etc.) virtually meaningless theoretically but also as a practical matter. In his work, Francione is critical of animal welfare reforms, such as the introduction of controlled atmosphere killing (CAK), ‘enriched’ battery cages and ‘cage-free’ systems of use, and argues that the reforms that do occur are driven by economic factors since, for example, the animal agricultural industries are learning that many intensive systems brought in throughout the world, including in Ireland, are not sustainable.

His address, entitled ‘The Animal Rights Debate: Abolition or Regulation’, to the Irish audience will be about the differences between animal welfarism and animal rights, the failure of welfare to substantially help animals, and how veganism must unequivocally be the moral baseline for the new animal rights movement.

Professor Francione’s involvement in “Animal Rights July” gives an Irish audience the opportunity to see and hear him live for the first time – and they can ask him questions too. Francione will inspire and motivate many – and likely challenge and even offend some. Given his views on the failure of animal welfarism, and his critique of the large, wealthy animal welfare corporations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA)** and The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), Francione is a controversial character within the animal protection movement. However, rather than respond to his position, movement leaders, especially in the USA, tend to accuse him of being ‘divisive,’ ‘extremist’ and even ‘fanatical’ for unashamedly advocating the vegan lifestyle as the basis of concern for nonhuman animals.

Now, for the first time, Irish animal advocates, and anyone else concerned about these moral issues, can find out for themselves.

* Gary Francione is influenced by Jainism and the principle of non-violence (ahimsa). He is increasingly embracing global communications technology as a means of reducing his impact on the planet by travelling, especially by air.

** People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PeTA) call themselves the largest animal rights organisation in the world. However, this claim is misleading in the sense that they use ‘rights’ merely as a label and not as the basis for their philosophical position on human relations with other animals. PeTA follow the philosophy of Peter Singer, author of Animal Liberation in 1975, who rejects rights as the foundation of ethics.

Gary Francione bio.

Gary L. Francione is Distinguished Professor of Law and Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Scholar of Law and Philosophy at Rutgers University School of Law-Newark.

He received his B.A. in philosophy from the University of Rochester, where he was awarded the Phi Beta Kappa O’Hearn Scholarship that allowed him to pursue graduate study in philosophy in Great Britain. He received his M.A. in philosophy and his J.D. from the University of Virginia. He was Articles Editor of the Virginia Law Review.

After graduation, he clerked for Judge Albert Tate, Jr., United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Sandra Day O’Connor of the United States Supreme Court. He was an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City before joining the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1984, where he was tenured in 1987. He joined the Rutgers faculty in 1989.

Professor Francione has been teaching animal rights and the law for more than 20 years, and he was the first academic to teach animal rights theory in an American law school. He has lectured on the topic throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, including serving as a member of the Guest Faculty of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has been a guest on numerous radio and television shows. He is well known throughout the animal protection movement for his criticism of animal welfare law and the property status of nonhuman animals, and for his abolitionist theory of animal rights.

He is the author of numerous books and articles on animal rights theory and animals and the law, including Introduction to Animal Rights: Your Child or the Dog? (2000), Rain Without Thunder: The Ideology of the Animal Rights Movement (1996), Animals, Property, and the Law (1995), and Vivisection and Dissection in the Classroom: A Guide to Conscientious Objection (with Anna E. Charlton) (1992). His forthcoming book, Animals as Persons: Essays on the Abolition of Animal Exploitation, will be published by Columbia University Press in 2007.

Professor Francione and his partner and colleague, Adjunct Professor Anna E. Charlton, started and operated the Rutgers Animal Rights Law Clinic/Center from 1990-2000, making Rutgers the first university in the United States to have animal rights law as part of the regular academic curriculum, and to award students academic credit not only for classroom work, but also for work on actual cases involving animal issues. Francione and Charlton represented without charge individual animal advocates, grassroots animal groups, and national and international animal organizations. Francione and Charlton currently teach a course on human rights and animal rights, and a seminar on animal rights theory and the law. Professor Francione also teaches courses on criminal law, criminal procedure, jurisprudence, and legal philosophy.