Prof. Angela Fernandez (University of Toronto): Grabbing at Freedom: Does an Escaped Animal Have a Right to Their Freedom?

About the Speaker
Angela Fernandez is Professor of law and history at the Faculty of Law at University of Toronto, where in addition to teaching animal law, she is the in-coming Director of the Animal Law Program. In collaboration with the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights, Law & Policy, she works on the production of the Brooks Animal Law Digest: Canada Edition. She has written a number of articles and essays in Animal Law, including “Not Quite Property, Not Quite Persons: A ‘Quasi’ Approach for Nonhuman Animals,” 5 Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law (2019): 155-232 and she is the author of a book-length study on the (in)famous first possession case about a fox that established the capture rule for wild animals: Pierson v. Post, the Hunt for the Fox: Law and Professionalization in American Legal Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). She is a co-editor, with Kristen Stilt and Justin Marceau, of a forthcoming Animal Law & Policy Coursebook.

About the Topic
On November 11th 2024 Vox published an article written by Angela Fernandez and Justin Marceau about 43 monkeys who escaped a laboratory in South Carolina supplying primates for use in laboratory research. It became the #1 Most Popular article of the day in an especially busy post-presidential election news cycle. In the article, the authors wrote about how the research lab arguably lost title to the monkeys when they escaped. In her talk, Angela Fernandez will outline the law review article she plans to write delving deeper into the animal escape cases and exploring the question of what is so appealing about animal escapes even to those who otherwise relatively uninterested in the freedom or intrinsic worth of nonhuman animals. As journalist Tove Danovich wrote in her exploration of this psychological phenomenon, prompted by the escape of a steer from a slaughterhouse in South Brooklyn: “For some reason, even people who are proud carnivores feel troubled by the idea of one of these freedom-grabbing escaped animals being sent to slaughter.” We dub these animals freedom-grabbers and propose to lay out the legal argument behind the widely-shared moral intuition that they deserve their freedom despite their formerly owned property status.

About the Series
National and international guests speak on the state, development and future of the legal landscape concerning the human-animal relationship. It is the series’ aim to build bridges – between national and international lines of discourse, between animal rights and animal welfare law, between animal rights and rights of nature, between legal scholarship and the natural sciences and civil society.

The lecture will be held as a hybrid event, both on site at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Mittelweg 187, 20148 Hamburg, and as a video conference via Zoom.

Please register no later than Tuesday, 15 July 2025 using this LINK.

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