Annual Lecture

Our Centre organises the Annual Animal Rights Law Lecture held at Cambridge University. Our Annual Lectures are delivered by distinguished thinkers in fields connected to the study of animals, animal welfare, and animal rights law. The Annual Lectures are designed to educate and to inspire discussion of animal rights law.

Past Annual Lectures

Our third Annual Lecture was delivered in October 2025 by Professor Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School) on ‘Beyond Kant and Bentham: A Bill of Rights for Nonhuman Animals’.

Professor Sunstein’s lecture used vivid storytelling, blending his personal connections with animals and decades of experience in law to ultimately propose a bill of rights for non-human animals.

Cass R. Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities.

  • In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed Sunstein as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Professor Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He has served as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

    Professor Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), Simpler: The Future of Government (2013), The Ethics of Influence (2015), #Republic (2017), Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide (2017), The Cost-Benefit Revolution (2018), On Freedom (2019), Conformity (2019), How Change Happens (2019), and Too Much Information (2020). He is now working on a variety of projects involving the regulatory state, 'sludge' (defined to include paperwork and similar burdens), fake news, freedom of speech, and animal rights.

Our second Annual Lecture was delivered in June 2024 by Peter Singer, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University.

Professor Singer’s Lecture addressed the need for further progress in ethics and law regarding animals, and the prospects of achieving it. A recording of the Lecture is available on Youtube.

Often described as the world’s most influential philosopher, Professor Singer became well-known internationally after the publication of his ground-breaking book Animal Liberation in 1975, which has been described as one of the most important books of the last 100 years. In 2023, he published the fully rewritten and updated Animal Liberation Now.

  • Professor Singer’s other books include: Practical Ethics, The Expanding Circle, How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, Pushing Time Away, The Life You Can Save, The Point of View of the Universe (co-authored with Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek), Ethics in the Real World, and The Buddhist and the Ethicist (co-authored with Shih Chao-Hwei).

    In 2005, Professor Singer was in Time Magazine’s list of 100 most influential people. In 2012, he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia, the nation’s highest civic honour. He founded the charity The Life You Can Save and is a founding co-editor of the Journal of Controversial Ideas. In 2021, he was awarded the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture, and in 2023, he shared, with Steven Pinker, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Humanities and Social Sciences.

    Learn more at https://www.petersinger.info/. Photo courtesy of Aletta Vaandering.

Our first Annual Lecture was given in March 2023 by Professor Frans de Waal of Emory University on Animal Emotions and Animal Rights Law.

The lecture was recorded and is available to watch on YouTube. To the left is a subtitled clip from the event.

Professor Frans de Waal is a Dutch/American biologist and primatologist known for his work on the behaviour and social intelligence of primates. His first book, Chimpanzee Politics (1982), compared the schmoozing and scheming of chimpanzees involved in power struggles with that of human politicians.

  • His scientific work has been published in hundreds of technical articles in journals such as Science, Nature, Scientific American, and outlets specialized in animal behaviour. His popular books - translated into 20+ languages - have made him one of the world's most visible primatologists. His latest books are Mama’s Last Hug (Norton, 2019) and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist (Norton, 2022). De Waal is C. H. Candler Professor Emeritus at Emory University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Utrecht University. He has been elected to the (US) National Academy of Sciences as well as the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007, Time declared him one of The World’s 100 Most Influential People Today.

    De Waal’s lecture theme was emotions in animals, where increasing understanding provides further evidence for the concept that animals and humans are on a single continuum, and therefore supports the proposition that many of the fundamental legal distinctions between animals and humans need to be rethought.