136: "Rationality comes with responsibility" - Kathy Hessler - Sentientism

Kathy is Assistant Dean, Animal Legal Education at George Washington University Law School and Director of the Animal Legal Education Initiative. Kathy has been a clinical law professor for 30 years and has been teaching animal law for 22 years. She is the first law professor hired to teach animal law full-time. Kathy helped develop the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School (L&C). For fourteen years she taught there and directed the Animal Law Clinic. She also created and directed the Aquatic Animal Law Initiative and is the co-founder of World Aquatic Animal Day along with Amy P. Wilson. Kathy co-authored “Animal Law in a Nutshell”, “Animal Law – New Perspectives on  Teaching Traditional Law” and the amicus briefs submitted in the U.S. v. Stevens and Justice v. Gwendolyn Vercher cases. She has written numerous law review and other articles and teaches and lectures widely across the U.S. and internationally.

Kathy was a board member with the Animal Legal Defense Fund; helped found the Animal Law Committee of the Cuyahoga County Bar; and was the chair and a founder of the Animal Law Section and the Balance in Legal Education Section of the American Association of Law Schools (AALS). She was also a co-chair of the Clinical Legal Education Section of the AALS, is on the board of the Center for Teaching Peace and is a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “who matters?”

Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

00:00 Welcome

- Randall Abate 

01:30 Kathy's Intro

- #animallaw professor & practitioner

- #nonviolence activism

- "This is one area of law where students can do something today... to change things"

- "& they're implicated... what we eat, what we wear"

- "It's hard to say 'all day I'm talking about protecting animals' & go home & eat them"

06:39 What's Real?

- Raised #Catholic & #republican "Rules bounded, status quo, respected authority... dogmatically religious"

- "You weren't supposed to question"... just listen to parents & nuns

- Noticing inconsistencies  (in one place girls can be altar servers, in another they can't)

- Mid to late #1960's "A lot of questioning"

- #Vatican II

- Liking justice aspects, not liking treatment of women/indigenous people

- Questioning in college

- "If people who told me that god existed... were wrong about women... they could be wrong about god"

...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall via this simple form.

Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on FaceBook. Come join us there!