Teaching Posthumanist Ethics in Law School: The Race, Culture, and Gender Dimensions of Student Resistance

This Essay challenges laws’ hegemonic humanist boundaries by analyzing the challenges involved in mainstreaming posthumanist subjects into the legal curricula. Posthumanist subjects in legal education are perceived as marginal and unworthy of serious discussion and scholarship. The author identifies the problems that can arise in introducing posthumanist critical content through her experience of teaching animal law as an optional course and as a part of a compulsory first-year course on property law and in advising on an upper-year student-led conference. She argues that the biases related to gendered, racialized, and otherwise differentiated norms inherited by the legal education system as a whole preclude students from embracing non-hegemonic legal discourses that challenge their perception of law and its role.

These biases lead to resistance and challenge to the posthumanist discussions of law even by marginalized, or “outsider,” students. The author argues that these internalized biases that constitute the worldview of the students could be addressed through innovative and sensitive pedagogic formulation in the teaching of posthumanist subjects like animal law.