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.

The concluding chapter reiterates the goal of the book: to offer a solution to animals’ lack of legal inclusion by offering a new foundation of legal subjectivity. The Principle of Multispecies Legality provides such a foundation for animals and, indeed, all those beings and entities with interests. By contrast with the present paradigm of legal personhood, the PML is not premised on a vision of the ‘archetypal’ human which serves to exclude not only animals but also many vulnerable human groups. The PML is also an improvement over the rights of nature, in that it more straightforwardly recognises the interests and worth of individual animals and does not maintain the ontological barrier between humans and all other nature. Finally, we are reminded that making change takes a multispecies village: that the PML is only as good as those who are willing to implement it. In order to ensure real change for animals and other interested beings, we need to work to encourage greater respect for the non-human world.