Animals, Legitimacy and the Future of Constitutionalism

Animals and the Constitution: Towards Sentience-Based Constitutionalism by John Olusegun Adenitire and Raffael Fasel is an ambitious book.It does not simply ask whether constitutions might better protect animals than they currently do.Nor does it merely extend the familiar repertoire of animal law scholarship into constitutional terrain.Its wager is larger and more unsettling.The book asks what constitutionalism itself would look like if it took seriously the fact that constitutions govern not only human beings but also a vast range of sentient beings whose lives, bodies, and habitats are deeply structured by law and public power.From that starting point, Adenitire and Fasel develop what they call 'sentience-based constitutionalism', a model of constitutional order that would give due concern to all sentient beings governed by the state (p.33).The book's organising claim is that contemporary constitutionalism suffers from a legitimacy gap.Existing constitutions are not merely anthropocentric in the broad and unsurprising sense that they are made by and for humans.Rather, they are structured around a narrower ideal type, the 'paradigmatic' human, understood as an adult, rational, autonomous legal and political agent.This ideal subject occupies the centre of constitutional thought and practice.Animals are