Advisory Board

We are pleased to introduce our Advisory Board whose members advise the Centre’s Director and Executive Director on general matters affecting the Centre.

Richard Ryder is the President of the RSPCA, where he previously served as an elected Trustee and as Chairman. After reading Experimental Psychology at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and receiving a PhD in Political and Social Sciences, he worked for years in Oxford as a Clinical Psychologist and later as a political lobbyist at Westminster for IFAW. He has published ten books, coined the terms Speciesism and Painism, founded Eurogroup for Animals in Brussels, served as the Mellon Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Tulane University, and secured large RSPCA funding for the rapid development of Animal Welfare Science and for purchasing the first Sea Shepherd boat. He has seen the passage of some 56 new European pieces of legislation to protect animals and was awarded the Richard Martin Award in 2003 and the Peter Singer Prize in 2021.

Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her research expertise includes critical animal law, vegan ecofeminist theory, and postcolonial theory. She has held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University and currently serves as Director of the Animals & Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria as well as on the Editorial Boards of Social & Legal Studies, Politics and Animals, and Hypatia. Her manuscript entitled Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021 and her documentary, A Deeper Kindness: Youth Activism in Animal Law launched in October 2022. Professor Deckha is a graduate of McGill University, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Columbia Law School.

Justin Marceau is a Professor of Law and the Brooks Institute Faculty Research Scholar of Animal Law and Policy at Denver Sturm College of Law, where he is also the Faculty director of the Animal Law Program. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Justice for Animals Award and the Colorado Criminal Defense Bar’s Gideon Award. He is a member of the American Law Institute, was a visiting professor at Harvard Law School in 2020 and UC Irvine in 2021, and works on several projects and initiatives with the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy. His research focuses on criminal law, animal law, and constitutional law. He is the author of more than 40 law review articles and essays, and two textbooks. His first book, Beyond Cages, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019 and in 2022, he and Lori Gruen published the co-edited volume Carceral Logics (Cambridge University Press).

Saskia Stucki is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg) and Habilitation candidate at the University of Basel Law School. Previously, she was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program and the coordinator of the doctoral programme Law and Animals at the University of Basel Law School. She is the author of One Rights: Human and Animal Rights in the Anthropocene (Springer 2022) and Grundrechte für Tiere (Nomos 2016), and co-editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law. Her research interests include animal law, animal rights, human rights, legal theory, environmental law, climate mainstreaming, and good food governance.