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.

In this chapter I analyze what grounds there might be for delimiting electorates in a geographical way, as we have long done. The best justification for that, I suggest, is the Proximity Principle – the principle that we should govern ourselves together with others nearby to us. The justification for that principle, in turn, was that proximity generally increases the frequency, range, depth and certainty of peoples interactions with one another. In short, including everyone proximate to one another in the same electorate was just a way of enfranchising All Affected Interests. But with the advent of globalization has come the increasing scope for and reality of action at a distance. Nowadays we can be relatively certain of having frequent, wide-ranging and deep interactions with others far away. So the same factors that once justified including people proximate to one another in the same electorate would now justify extending voting rights to others much more distant, beyond the bounds of todays states.