Ela Leshem ’20 Joins Fordham Law Faculty — and Animal Law’s Scholarly Growth

The Law, Ethics & Animals Program (LEAP) congratulates Ela Leshem ’20 on her appointment as Associate Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law. Leshem is among the recent Yale Law School graduates — including Lingxi Chenyang ’20 and Jack Whiteley ’18 — who have entered law teaching with an interest in issues of nonhuman animals and the law. 

LEAP and its supporter, the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law & Policy share a goal to promote the strengthening and expansion of animal law as a scholarly field. This year, LEAP Student Fellow Maggie Wang ’25 was among the recipients of the Brooks Emerging Scholar Fellowship, designed to increase the number of legal academics in the United States who are committed to making animal law a significant component of their teaching and research. LEAP works to produce scholarship about the legal, scientific, and moral questions raised by humanity’s treatment of other animals, and to empower Yale scholars and students to create positive legal and political change for animals, people, and their environment.

Leshem is a legal theorist focusing on property and personhood status issues, including those relating to human bodies, animals, fetuses, artificial intelligence, and more. Her most recent paper, “Dead Bodies as Quasi-Persons,” argues that U.S. law treats dead bodies as entities with moral status between things and persons and was published by the Vanderbilt Law Review in May. 

Prior to joining Fordham, Leshem was a fellow at the Senate Judiciary Committee and clerked for Chief Judge David Barron of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. While studying law at Yale, she was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. Leshem studied music at the University of the Arts in Bern, Switzerland and the State University of Music in Stuttgart, Germany and received a doctorate in philosophy and masters in political theory at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship.

LEAP Postgraduate Fellow Laurie Sellars spoke with Leshem about her scholarship and plans for future research.

Your scholarship centers around the personhood status of “liminal” beings or entities. How did you become interested in these questions?

I came to law from moral and political philosophy and found myself drawn to legal questions that are subject to deep moral disagreements. Few moral disagreements seemed as intractable and legally consequential to me as disagreements over who or what should count as a person. What should have moral status, as opposed to being just a thing that we can treat as property. Contemporary examples of entities whose personhood is contested include animals, fetuses, religious artifacts, and increasingly also artificial intelligence.

Focusing on your recent paper, “Dead Bodies as Quasi-Persons,” in what ways do you see American law treating dead bodies as “quasi-persons” versus another legal status? How do your conclusions bear on the legal status of other legal entities, e.g., nonhuman animals? 

U.S. laws tend to attribute a moral status to dead human bodies that falls well above that of a mere thing, but also well below that of a full moral person. I call this in-between moral status “quasi-personhood.” U.S. laws tend to treat dead bodies as quasi-persons in many different contexts: laws protecting dead bodies against denigration to the status of property, waste, or nonhuman animals; laws ensuring that dead bodies be treated as individuals with names; and laws protecting dead bodies against visual, physical, and sexual abuse. Throughout, these legal protections tend to attribute a narrow set of dignity interests to dead bodies — hence, their quasi-personhood status.

All this matters for nonhuman animals. Angela Fernandez has argued that our laws treat nonhuman animals, too, as quasi-persons. That is, U.S. laws attribute a narrow set of moral interests to nonhuman animals. And while that puts nonhuman animals above mere things, it also places them well below full moral persons. So quasi-personhood is a descriptive reality that animal law scholars and animal rights activists need to grapple with when they advocate for greater status recognition for nonhuman animals. Here, my paper’s analysis of the law’s treatment of dead bodies as quasi-persons might help in at least two ways. One is that it unearths a longstanding legal precedent for recognizing that the human treatment of quasi-persons is limited by a duty of care, which prevents an exploitative property treatment. So even if for some nonhuman animals, quasi-personhood treatment were all that is either feasible or desirable, there is precedent for protecting nonhuman animals, as quasi-persons, in much more robust ways than is currently the case. 

Another contribution I hope my paper makes to the debates over nonhuman animals’ status is to show how far an internal critique of our treatment of quasi-persons can go. I devote much of the paper to arguing that our lesser treatment of some dead bodies on the basis of class or race is wrongful, regardless of what status dead bodies ought to have in the abstract. Similarly, I think we often need not persuade people that certain nonhuman animals are full moral persons to expose the wrongfulness of their current mistreatment.

Looking forward, where do plan to focus your research efforts next? Do you have any ongoing or planned projects you can discuss?

I’ll discuss two of my current projects. In one, my coauthor and I are arguing that the Supreme Court’s landmark First Amendment decisions protecting flag burning turn on a neglected status question with broad ramifications: whether the American flag is a quasi-person or just a symbol. The other project grew out of my paper on dead bodies and bears more directly on nonhuman animals: it grapples with the ways in which U.S. laws sometimes rely on the subordination of nonhuman animals to give meaning to the concept of human dignity.