Bridging the gap between jurisprudence and questions of legal status

Joshua Jowitt

Chapter 7 in Research Handbook on Animal Law and Animal Rights, 2025, pp 141-159 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: All legal scholarship makes theoretical assumptions – some of these are acknowledged, but others are not. The purpose of this chapter is to attempt to bridge the gap between scholarship concerned with the legal status of nonhuman animals and canonical debates in jurisprudence. It is hoped that in doing so we can more clearly understand what assumptions are being made in contemporary scholarship on legal status so that we can be certain our theoretical understanding of the concept is as full as possible. The chapter has three main sections. The first will demonstrate that, in holding that legal status can be granted by legal officials and that their discretion is absolute in this regard, both orthodox and contemporary understandings of legal status presuppose a commitment to the sources thesis that a natural lawyer might reject. The second offers a natural law account of extensional beliefs associated with legal status grounded in the Radbruch formula, and the final section considers the impact of Hart's ‘Open Texture of Language’ and Hohfeldian theory on our understanding of the concept of legal status.

Keywords: Legal status; Natural law; Legal positivism; Jurisprudence; Legal theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035324873
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