The idea for this book was born during the 2013 Annual Law and Society
Association meeting in Boston. Listening to presentation after presentation,
it became painfully clear to me that the sociolegal community, at
least the hundreds of scholars present in that particular room, seldom paid
attention to anything other than human subjects (with the exception of
corporations). A quick survey that I conducted then of two central law and
society journals, Law and Society Review and Law and Social Inquiry, backed up
my initial intuition: of 265 articles, 165 book reviews, and 63 review essays
published between 2008 and 2013, only two were dedicated to questions
concerning nonhuman animals. Other nonhuman organisms have typically
been even less visible in sociolegal scholarship.