Professor Maneesha Deckha

About Maneesha

Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair at the Faculty of Law, University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her research and teaching interests include critical animal law, feminist analysis of law, postcolonial legal studies, reproductive rights, health law and bioethics. Her work has been published in Canada and internationally in socio-legal and interdisciplinary venues including the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law, the Harvard Journal of Gender and Law, Hypatia, the McGill Law Journal, and Sexualities. She has also contributed to multiple anthologies relating to critical animal studies, feminism, cultural pluralism, and health law and policy, and is the recipient of grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and the Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program. Professor Deckha has held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law & Society at New York University. She currently serves on the editorial boards of Politics and Animals and Hypatia.

Recent Presentations:

• "Animalization and Dehumanization Concerns: Another Psychological Barrier to Animal Law Reform" - 2023 European Animal Law Conference (UK)
• Invited Speaker, “Culture, Race, Veganism: Navigating the Tensions to Keep Animals in View” in the Voices in Vegan Studies Speaker Series, Arihantain Institute.
• “Not personhood... beingness” - Sentientism Podcast, August 2024
  • Apple podcast
  • Spotify
• Neither Property nor Persons | A Case for Animals as Legal “Beings” The Overpopulation Podcast, July 22, 2024

Recent Publications:

• "Feminist Legal Systems that Benefit Animals", ed Chloe Taylor, Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals (Routledge, 2024), 218-232
• “Animal (Rights) Law: Fifty Years of Taking Exception to Human Exceptionalism Amidst Enduring Themes” (2023) 50:3 Dal Law Journal 339-377. Open access: https://digitalcommons.schulichlaw.dal.ca/dlj/vol46/iss1/13/
• “Animalization and Dehumanization Concerns: Another Psychological Barrier to Animal Law Reform” (2023) 2:2 PHAIR: Psychology of Human-Animal Intergroup Relations 1-16, Art e10147, open access: https://doi.org/10.5964/phair.10147.
• “(Feminist) Animal rights without animal personhood?” in Erika Cudworth, Ruth E McKie & Di Turgoose, eds, Feminist Animal Studies: Theories, Practices, Politics (Routledge, 2023), 19-34.
• “Human Children, Nonhuman Animals, and a Plant-Based Vegan Future” In Feminist Animal and Multispecies Studies (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2023), 175-204. Open access: https://brill.com/display/book/9789004679375/BP000015.xml
• “Sup-Plant-ing Anthropocentric Legalities: Can the Rule of Law Tolerate Intensive Animal Agriculture?”, In International Law and Posthuman Theory, eds Mathilda Arvidsson and Emily Jones (London: Routledge, 2023).