Owned, An Ethological Jurisprudence of Property

This book draws upon domestication science to undertake a radical reappraisal of the jurisprudence of property and intellectual property.

Bringing together animal studies and legal philosophy, it articulates a critique of dominant property models and relationships from the perspective of cognitive ethology, domestication science and animal behaviour. In doing so, a radical new picture of property emerges. Focusing on the emergence of property models through prevailing ideas of human domestication and settlement, the book challenges the anthropocentrism that informs standard approaches to ownership and to authorship. Utilising a wide range of examples from ethology and animal studies, the book thus rethinks the very nature of property as uniquely human.

This highly original contribution to the fields of property and intellectual property will appeal not only to legal scholars in these areas, as well as in animal law, but also to legal theorists and others working in the social sciences with interests in posthumanism and animal studies.

Author Biography

Johanna Gibson is Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property at Queen Mary, University of London, where she teaches and researches in intellectual property, creative industries, and animal law and welfare. Gibson is the author of several other Routledge monographs, including, Intellectual Property, Medicine and Health (2017), The Logic of Innovation (2014), Creating Selves (2006), and Community Resource (2005). Along with the humans, she shares her home with four rescue dogs and four rescue cats, all arriving with wildly disjunctive stories.