This chapter presents an alternative to legal personhood and the rights of nature as the means to better include animals within the scope of legal justice. It offers the Principle of Multispecies Legality as not merely an account of animals’ legal subjectivity but of the legal subjectivity of all those beings and entities that have – or that we might, as a democratic society, choose to recognise as having – interests. The PML holds that interests-bearing entitles one to recognition as a subject of the law, with the capacity to take legal action and have one’s interests considered impartially. In rejecting sentience as the grounds of animals’ politico-legal inclusion, the PML’s account of legal subjectivity provides for animals alongside existing sentient and non-sentient legal subjects, like humans and corporations. It also leaves the door open for other valuable entities that currently lack legal subjecthood, such as plants, fungi, bodies of water, and ecosystems. The chapter argues that the inclusivity of the PML is beneficial not only for animals and other non-human entities but also for those humans whose legal subjectivity remains tenuous under existing personhood paradigms.

This chapter seeks to strengthen the account of the Principle of Multispecies Legality offered in the previous chapter by responding to potential queries and concerns around the proposal’s structure, scope, and feasibility. The outlined concerns are as follows: that the PML is an attempt to redefine legal personhood; that a focus on interests is too inclusive, in that in opening the doors of legal inclusion to a relatively wide range of beings and entities it would put undesirable constraints on human activity; that a focus on interests is too limited in that it doesn’t capture the full scope of animals’ capabilities; that the PML will result in the equal treatment of humans and all other animals; that we shouldn’t base a being’s worth on their possession of a particular characteristic; and that the PML will be too unfeasible to implement.