Sentientism 173: "Welfare protections have failed animals" - Legal Academic Dr Jane Kotzmann - Sentientism
Jane is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Deakin Law School. Jane obtained degrees in Commerce, Law (with Honours), and a PhD in human rights law from Deakin University, and a Postgraduate Diploma in Teaching (Teach for Australia) from the University of Melbourne. Jane has published research in relation to the human right to education, the human rights of disabled people, animal rights, and animal related laws. She has taught a variety of units, including human rights law, administrative law and contract law. She was a finalist for 'Academic of the Year' in the Australian Law Awards in 2019 and 2020. Her article titled 'Recognising the Sentience of Animals in Law: A Justification and Framework for Australian States and Territories’ was given an Australian Legal Research Award in 2022 for Best Early Career Research Article. Before embarking on her career in academia, Jane served as an associate in the inaugural Teach for Australia program. Prior to this, she was in private legal practice for a number of years, principally in commercial litigation.
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
02:41 Jane's Intro
- Lawyer (“I didn’t really like that very much”), teaching high school (“enjoyable… but exhausting”), now academic research and teaching
- Human rights PhD, now animal law focused “I often think about concepts that exist in human rights literature and think about how they might apply… to the animal rights space”
04:40 What's Real?
- Catholic and Anglican Christian parents but neither “practicing”. Although some tension between the two families
- Attending Lutheran school at 15 “Lacking in some self-confidence… the religious angle… allowed me a way to feel like I could connect with something… I tried really hard… but I always struggled with trying to make myself believe something that… doesn’t have a great deal of evidence.”
- “I think there is something other than what we can see, touch, feel and taste – but I’m not going to commit to knowing what that is”
- What we can sense “humans can generally agree on those things… beyond that, there may be more – I don’t know”
- “Some very intelligent people I know are deeply religious… I have no problem with that except where they decide that that allows them to hurt others. That’s where I draw the line.”
11:42 What Matters?
- Parents’ religions didn’t affect childhood ethics much
- Lutheran… “By and large… big hearted, generous, empathetic, wonderful people.” But “I took great pleasure… in debating the alleged sins of homosexuality with some of the pastors.”
- “I always found issues with these rigid rules that didn’t really make a lot of sense to me”
- Developing morality through reading fiction “I read a truck-load… through fiction I developed a strong sense of empathy… that’s what drove me then and drives me today”
14:54 Who Matters
- “Veganism back then was absolutely radical”
47:00 A Better World?
01:15:57 Follow Jane
- “I don’t do a lot of social media… people can of course email me!”
- Jane’s Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law talk: “Sentience and Intrinsic Worth as a Pluralist Foundation for Fundamental Animal Rights”
...and much more. Full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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