Thanks to Jeremy for directing my attention to, among other things, this issue of the journal Law and Contemporary Problems (affiliated with Duke Law School) which focuses on animal law and policy.

In particular, this article by Jeff Leslie and Cass Sunstein offers an in-depth argument for a “disclosure regime” that would label food products according to how the animals used to produce them were treated. They call this “animal rights without controversy” because it would simply create a market mechanism whereby consumers could express their preferences for less animal suffering without resolving the issue of what rights animals have.

Leslie and Sunstein concede that this wouldn’t please everyone, especially those folks that don’t think animal welfare should be made to depend on how much people are willing to pay for it. But they point out, rightly I think, that this doesn’t exclude other regulatory approaches and would have the added advantage of publicly airing the question of animal treatment in the process of establishing the labelling guidelines.