Should Animal Welfare be Public Morality?: A Study of ‘Living Instrument Doctrine’ through Jurisprudential Perspectives
Keywords:
Living Instrument Doctrine, Right to Freedom of Religion, Legal Realism, Public Moral, Animal Welfare, Law as IntegrityAbstract
This article aims to explain how the European Court of Human Rights’ approach of the Living Instrument Doctrine reflects Legal Realism through its evolutive interpretation and evaluation in social facts of emerging trends in member States of the Council of Europe and to further analyze limitations of this approach, whether the Court’s interpretation of the Living Instrument Doctrine neglected minority’s rights, particularly Muslims and Jews’ rights to freedom of religion, and neglected the spirit of the European Convention on Human Rights.
This article thus intends to introduce Ronald Dworkin’s jurisprudence of ‘Law as Integrity’, which concerns the Court’s constructive interpretation in order to discover the best case. This jurisprudential approach better suits the case study and the Living Instrument Doctrine than Legal Realism’s approach by considering both past decisions and the present condition as a whole to preserve the spirit of the Convention and to protect the right to freedom of religion.
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