Maneesha Deckha
Senior Fellow 2023–2024

Maneesha Deckha is professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria in Canada. Her research expertise includes critical animal law, vegan ecofeminist theory, and postcolonial theory. She is the director of the Animals & Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria and serves on advisory bodies relating to sociolegal studies, animal law, and feminist theory, including the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law and Faunalytics. Maneesha is a graduate of McGill University, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Columbia Law School.

Her manuscript entitled Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021 and her open access documentary series designed for high school and undergraduate screening, A Deeper Kindness: Youth Activism in Animal Law, launched in October 2022. Her current monograph project, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, examines the lack of government regulation in favor of farmed animals as a rule of law violation and thus a matter of constitutional import.