Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders: Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and the Challenges of Globalization

Charlotte E. Blattner

May 2019 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

Extraterritorial jurisdiction stands at the juncture of international law and animal law and promises to open a path to understanding and resolving the global problems that challenge the core of animal law. As corporations have relocated and the animal industry (agriculture, medical research, entertainment, etc.) has dispersed its production facilities across the territories of multiple states, regulatory gaps and fears of a race to the bottom have become a pressing issue of global policy. This book provides enough background to allow readers to understand why extraterritorial jurisdiction must respond to these developments, counters objections that readers might raise, and describes how to improve animal law in tandem. The heart of the work is a fully-fledged catalogue of options for extraterritorial jurisdiction, which states can employ to strengthen their animal laws. The book offers top-down perspectives drawn from general international law and trade law, and complements them by a bottom-up up view from the perspective of animal law. The approach connects the law of jurisdiction to substantive law and opens up deeper questions about moral directionality, state and corporate duties owed animals, and the comparative advantages of constitutional, criminal, and administrative animal law. To ensure that extraterritorial animal law does not become complicit in oppressing ethnic and cultural minorities, the book offers critical interdisciplinary perspectives, informed by posthumanist and postcolonialist discourse. Readers will further learn when and how extraterritorial jurisdiction violates international law, and the consequences of exercising it illegally under international law. This work answers questions about how and why extraterritorial jurisdiction can overcome the steepest hurdles for animal law and help move us toward a just global interspecies community.

About the author

Charlotte E. Blattner is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School.