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6 Law, Culture & Human. 7 (2010)

handle is hein.journals/lculh6 and id is 1 raw text is: Editorial Law, Culture and the Humanities Editorial 6(1)7 @The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: http://www. sagepub.co.ul/journalsPermission.nav DOI: 10.1 177/1743872109348966 http://Ich.sagepub.com OSAGE The encounter with otherness has had a fundamental impact in shaping the humanities and the way humanists understand law. And, even more vividly the character of law's encounters with otherness are fundamentally important in revealing the character of a legal order. In all legal orders sharp differences mark the boundaries of membership/ outsider. But these boundaries are not just spatial/territorial/jurisdictional. They are drawn within law's domain to mark different layers of legal protection from the most extensive and protective to moments when law's protection is withdrawn. In coming to terms with otherness perhaps no distinction is more dramatic than the difference drawn between humans and other non-human animals. Non-human animals seem, at once, to need legal protection but not to be the bearers of legal rights. The law forbids certain forms of inhumane treatment and enjoins humans to avoid treating non-human animals in particular ways. Yet the law allows, tolerates or sanctions humans in doing things to other species that would constitute grave offenses if done by one human to another. For the humanist the most pressing issue in our encounter with non-human animals is how we understand and represent them. Here we are directed as much to cultural as to legal practices. In our efforts to understand and represent animals we find both an inspi- ration for more refined and sensitive scholarship and a frustrating limit to our scholarly understandings. Exploring the way law and the humanities express those refinements and sensitivities and register those frustrations is the work done in the four contributions to our Commentary Section Animals, Law, and Culture. Austin Sarat

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