Steve Walker has posted Protective Companions and the Constitution: Living Guardians of the Household and Community on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
From the Founding to the present, dogs have served as entrusted companions within human protective communities, including households, militias, military units, and police forces. Despite this continuity, modern constitutional doctrine often treats dogs as fungible personal property when they serve private human communities, while recognizing their significance as trusted partners when they serve public ends. This Article examines that asymmetry through historical practice, behavioral understanding, and constitutional structure. It argues that existing constitutional doctrine—particularly under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments—misfires when it collapses entrusted dogs into “mere property,” minimizing the seriousness of state use of lethal force against them. Without extending constitutional personhood to animals or insulating dangerous behavior from regulation, the Article proposes a modest doctrinal reframe where courts should treat entrusted dogs as relationshipembedded equals whose role in human security warrants accurate constitutional description and meaningful scrutiny.