Our Team

Sean Butler

Co-Director

Dr Sean Butler is an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund’s College. Previously, he worked at Shell and Nokia. Sean studied Law at Oxford (St Edmund Hall) and the LSE, as well as Genetics at the University of Cambridge (CPGS) before taking his PhD in social science at Imperial College, London. He specialises in intellectual property strategy in life sciences, and technology-based start-ups. He is also CEO of Cambridge Agritech, a syndicate of investors in agritech startups. He was previously Director of Studies in Law at St Edmund’s, and he teaches Roman Law and Animal Rights Law. 

Raffael Fasel

Co-Director

Dr Raffael Fasel is an Assistant Professor in Public Law at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. He was previously Yates Glazebrook Fellow and Director of Studies in Law at Jesus College, and Fellow in Law at LSE Law School. He obtained his PhD in Law from the University of Cambridge (Sidney Sussex College), with a thesis on the legal theory and intellectual history of human and animal rights, for which he was awarded the Law Faculty’s Yorke Prize. He holds a Bachelor of Law and a Master of Law degree from the University of Fribourg, an MA in Philosophy from University College London, and an LLM from Yale Law School. 

Junior Research Associate & Teaching Network Manager

Eva Bernet Kempers

Dr Eva Bernet Kempers is a full 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. Eva also 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.

Carolina Leiva Ilabaca

Junior Research Associate

Dr Carolina Leiva Ilabaca is an Assistant Professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Previously, she was a Visiting Researcher at the Helsinki Animal Law Centre and the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, alongside her work as a lawyer and legal counsellor. She holds a PhD in Law from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the University of Chile, where she explored the intersection between Criminal Law and Animal Rights Law in Chile and Spain. She continues to pursue her research in the field from a global perspective as a Junior Research Associate at our Centre.

Marketing and Public Relations Manager

Carly McCann

Carly McCann is a creative marketing coordinator, presenter, performer, and theatre maker with a passion for communications and storytelling. She holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in both Broadcast Journalism and Theatre Performance from the Pennsylvania State University and a Master of Fine Arts in Advanced Theatre Practice from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Carly has produced and coordinated several creative events that have toured the UK. Carly is also the host of Animal Rights Tour, the Centre’s podcast that launched in September 2025.

2026 Visiting Fellows

Professor Saul Olyan is Samuel Ungerleider Jr. Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. He is author of Human, Divine, and Textual Relationships: Essays on the Hebrew Bible (Brill, 2024); Animal Rights and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2023); Violent Rituals of the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2019); Friendship in the Hebrew Bible (Yale University Press, 2017); Social Inequality in the World of the Text: The Significance of Ritual and Social Distinctions in the Hebrew Bible (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011); Disability in the Hebrew Bible: Interpreting Mental and Physical Differences (Cambridge University Press, 2008); Biblical Mourning: Ritual and Social Dimensions (Oxford University Press, 2004); Rites and Rank: Hierarchy in Biblical Representations of Cult (Princeton University Press, 2000); "A Thousand Thousands Served Him": Exegesis and the Naming of Angels in Ancient Judaism (J.C.B. Mohr/Paul Siebeck, 1993); and Asherah and the Cult of Yahweh in Israel (Scholars Press, 1988). He is editor or co-editor of thirteen volumes, including Supplementation and the Study of the Hebrew Bible (Brown Judaic Studies, 2018); Ritual Violence in the Hebrew Bible (Oxford University Press, 2015); Social Theory and the Study of Israelite Religion (SBL, 2012) and Household and Family Religion in Antiquity (Blackwell, 2008), and the author of various journal articles, essays and reviews.

Professor Angela Fernandez is a Professor and Director of the Animal Law Program at the Henry N.R. Jackman Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto with a cross-appointment in the Department of History. Her book Pierson v. Post, the Hunt for the Fox: Law and Professionalization in American Legal Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2018) is an in-depth study of an (in)famous first possession property case involving a fox. She has co-edited several books on legal history and written numerous book chapters and articles, including “Not Quite Property, Not Quite Persons: A ‘Quasi’ Approach for Nonhuman Animals” 5 Canadian Journal of Comparative and Contemporary Law (2019): 155-232. She has been organizing a monthly Working Group on Animals in the Law and Humanities since 2013, sits on the Advisory Board of the Global Journal of Animal Law, was the 2023 inaugural Vermont Law and Graduate School’s Distinguished Animal Law Scholar in the Animal Law & Policy Institute, and she has been a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics since 2018. She also oversees the production of the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights, Law & Policy’s Animal Law Digest: Canada Edition and the University of Toronto’s Animal Law Research Guide. From 2020-2023 she worked with Brooks and Animal Justice to organize the North American Animal Law Conference and the Canadian Animal Law Conference.

In addition to "Animals and the Law" (taught in the Fall of 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024), Professor Fernandez teaches Legal History. She is also the Chair of the Directed Research Program. She is interested in supervising students working on animal law and legal history topics at the JD and graduate level. Watch Professor Fernandez’s Video “Animals as Property, Quasi-Property or Quasi-Person” in the Brooks Institute for Animal Rights, Law & Policy Series “Animal Law Fundamentals”

2026 Visiting Researcher

Marcia Condoy Truyenque is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki as part of the "Agency in Law" project. Her research, "Animal Legal Agency", explains that many animals are, or have the ability to be, legal agents who can act within the framework of the legal system. To do so, she delves into various concepts such as autonomy, authority, legal identity, legal competences, legal power, obligations, and legal sanctions, all applied to animals. Previously, Marcia obtained an Animal Law LLM with Honors at Lewis & Clark Law School. She also completed online master courses in International Law and International Human Rights Law at the Université Catholique de Louvain. As part of her social work, Marcia funded Derecho Animal en Peru, an organization dedicated to developing and promoting Animal Law in her home country, Peru. Before starting her academic life, Marcia litigated Labor Law and Constitutional Law cases. She also litigated Animal Law cases, mainly regarding companion animals.

Recent Visiting Fellows

Justin Marceau is a Professor of Law, the Brooks Institute Faculty Research Scholar of Animal Law and Policy, and the Faculty Director of the Animal Law Program at Sturm College of Law, University of Denver, USA. He co-founded and helps direct a first-of-its-kind law school clinic, the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project. He is the author of more than 40 academic articles and essays, and two textbooks. His first book, Beyond Cages (Cambridge University Press 2019) serves as one of the first extended critiques of carceral animal law. His most recent book, Truth and Transparency (Cambridge University Press 2023), was co-authored with Alan Chen, and was awarded the Tankard Prize.

Małgorzata Lubelska Sazanów is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland. She obtained her PhD degree in 2018, after having defended her thesis on the problem of animals as specific objects of obligations at the Universities of Silesia and Osnabrück, Germany. In 2018, she also obtained an LLM degree from the University of California, focusing on wildlife trade. Since then, she has published extensively in the field of animal law and animal ethics, and has received several awards, including a Max Planck Institute Fellowship, a DAAD Fellowship, and the Polish Science Foundation Award for the 100 best young Polish scientists.

Recent Visiting Researchers

Victoria Kühborth is a research assistant and doctoral candidate at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and a Visiting Researcher at our Centre in Lent Term 2025. Her PhD research focuses on the enforcement mechanism of EU farm animal protection laws. During her time at our Centre, she explored the role of trust in restorative justice for animals.

Pablo Serra-Palao is a PhD Candidate and researcher in legal philosophy at Comillas Pontifical University, Spain. His doctoral research focuses on developing a vulnerability-based theory of animal rights, a topic he explored during his time at our Centre in Lent Term 2025. His general research interests revolve around exploring non-anthropocentric legal realities.

  • El Jones, Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics, Economics, and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University, was a Visiting Researcher at our Centre in Lent 2024. Her research was centred on police dogs and connections between race, Black feminism, and animal oppression. 

    Serrin Rutledge-Prior, Research Fellow with the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy, was a Visiting Researcher at our Centre in Lent 2024. Her research focused on the relationship between animal rights and rights of nature.

    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.

  • Sergio Dellavalle is Professor of Public Law and State Theory at the University of Turin, Italy, and was the first Visiting Fellow at our Centre in Lent and Easter 2024. His research centred on this forthcoming book ‘A Republic of Fellow Sufferers: How to Grant Rights to Nature’, which explores different strategies to justify the attribution of rights to non-human natural entities.