Eva Bernet Kempers is a part-time post-doc at the Animal & Law Chair of the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Previously, she was a Visiting Researcher at the Helsinki Animal Law Centre, the Global Animal Law Project at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, and the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law. She obtained her PhD in Law from the University of Antwerp on the concept of animal dignity. Besides pursuing academic research and assisting in the organization of the Centre’s events, Eva takes on the role of Teaching Network Manager, coordinating an international network of law lecturers who teach animal rights law at universities throughout the world.

Sergio Dellavalle is Professor of Public Law and State Theory at the University of Turin, Italy, and Senior Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. He is presently authoring a book entitled ‘A Republic of Fellow Sufferers: How to Grant Rights to Nature’, in which he explores different strategies to justify the attribution of rights to non-human natural entities. During his stay at CCARL, he will carry out research on whether a revised recognition-based theory of rights can be applied to sentient non-human animals. He explores the consequences this might have regarding both the understanding of the possible foundation of rights and the project of extending moral and legal entitlements to non-human components of the natural world.

El Jones is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics, Economics, and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, Canada. In addition to her academic work, she is a poet, journalist, and prison abolitionist. Her research, centred on police dogs, explores the connections between race, Black feminism, and animal oppression, recognizing that the abolition movement must also include animal liberation. While at CCARL, she will be researching coercion, violence, and models of humanness in service dog protection law in Canada, and their weaponization as police propaganda.

Serrin Rutledge-Prior is a Research Fellow with the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy. Her work focuses on how animals environment can be better represented in the politico-legal sphere, and how liberal democracies should accommodate those who advocate for animals. During her time at CCARL, she will be exploring the kinds of moral frameworks that underpin animal welfare law and policy, and how these frameworks can be broadened to better recognise animals’ agency, dignity, and relationality – and not merely their sentience.

Marie Leth-Espensen is affiliated with the Sociology of Law Department at Lund University. She will be a guest at CCARL from early to mid-March, working on an article that builds upon and extends ideas from her doctoral research concerning the ethical implications of how animal suffering is constructed through the framework of animal welfare law.

Yongbeom Choi is a reporter judge at the Constitutional Court of Korea and a PhD candidate at Seoul University. He will be a guest at CCARL from mid-February to early March. While in Cambridge, he will be working on a research project that explores two pieces of (proposed) Korean legislation on the prohibition of dog meat and the reform of animals’ status as property.

Michaël Lessard, SJD student at the University of Toronto, visited our Centre in Lent 2023. His research was focused on the legal recognition of animal sociability and agency, and how this could complete the ongoing legal recognition of animal sentience.

Paulina Siemieniec, PhD Candidate in the Philosophy Department at Queen’s University, visited our Centre in Lent 2023. Her research dealt with the legal rights domesticated animals should have to Sexual and Reproductive Health, including the right to agency in sexual and reproductive decision-making processes.

Katharina Braun, PhD candidate in Law at Freie Universität Berlin, visited our Centre in Lent 2022. She worked on a project that analysed whether consent or a related concept can be employed to distinguish between permissible and impermissible human-animal interactions

Carolina Leiva Ilabaca, PhD candidate in Law at the University of Chile and the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, was a Visitor to our Centre in Lent 2022. Her research examined different approaches to animal subjecthood.

Ankita Shanker, PhD in Law candidate at the University of Basel, was an externally-funded visitor to the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law from April-September 2021. During her stay, she identified the content, strength, and limits of fundamental animal rights and personhood, relying on foundational principles of fundamental rights law and legal theories.

Eva Bernet Kempers, PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp in Belgium, visited the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law in Lent 2021. Her research at the Centre focused on developing an alternative account of legal personhood that goes beyond the binary and court-based accounts that are dominant in the common law.

Joshua Jowitt, Lecturer in Law at Newcastle University, visited the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law in Lent 2021. During his stay at the Centre, Josh developed a natural law account of the normative foundations of legal personhood and explored its implications in the case of Happy the elephant.

Pablo Pérez Castelló, PhD candidate in Philosophy at Royal Holloway University of London, visited the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law in Lent 2021. His research explored how the constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia should change if wild animals were given a right to self-determination.

Nick Ampt, PhD candidate at the Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne, visited the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law in Lent 2020 as one of our two first Visiting Students. Nick pursued a research project dealing with different legal statuses that the law can award to animals and other beings.

Robyn Trigg, non-practising solicitor and full-time DPhil in Law student at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, visited the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law in Lent 2020 as one of our two first Visiting Students. Her research probed the dualisms on which current animal laws and animal rights proposals are based.