Abstract
This essay reflects on the didactic process of teaching a course on Animal Law in Mainland China and surveys the opportunity for Chinese and other Asian legal students and scholars to contribute to this emerging academic field. The author first clarifies his pedagogical ambitions in crafting a curriculum centred on a comparative approach to animal law. He notes the variable successes of his teaching strategies, offering techniques to better contextualize this at times foreign material for international students. The author then considers the unique ‘structural’ characteristics of animal law that make it an empowering vehicle in legal education, such as its signature ability to connect trans-legal theoretical frameworks to new, unanswered questions and its inherent practical connection to the individual’s development as an actualized citizen. In the final section of his essay, the author highlights areas of substantive animal law that could benefit from revision by non-Western thinkers. Areas particularly rich in content include cultural patterns in the discourse and rhetoric of animal law, definitional problems pre-conditional to animal legal theory and issues in transnational animal law. This essay functions at the intersection of international education, legal pedagogy and animal law but also considers trans-legal issues of wider import.
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