Books
Our Co-Directors have authored the world’s first animal rights law textbook as well as other books that facilitate the teaching and understanding of animal rights law.
Textbooks
Animal Rights Law
by Raffael Fasel and Sean Butler
We are excited to have launched Animal Rights Law (Hart Publishing 2023) on 23 February 2023, the first textbook that covers the new field of animal rights law and makes it accessible to readers from all around the world. Authored by Raffael N Fasel and Sean Butler, this easy-to-use book tells readers everything they need to know about animal rights law.
Using straightforward examples from over 30 legal systems from both the civil and common law traditions, and based on popular courses run by the authors who are co-founders at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights, the book takes the reader from the earliest anti-cruelty laws to modern animal welfare laws, to recent attempts to grant basic rights and personhood to animals. To help readers understand this legal evolution, it explains the ethics, legal theory, and social issues behind animal rights and connected topics such as property, subjecthood, dignity, and human rights.
Animal Rights Law is available for purchase here. To receive your 20% discount use discount code GLR CA3UK in the UK; GLR CA3US in the US; GLR CA3CA in Canada; or GLR CA3AU in Australia and New Zealand.
Two virtual book launches, by the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law and NYU’s Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program respectively, can be viewed on this page (left).
Derecho de los derechos animales.
El estatus jurídico actual de los animales –propiedad de los animales legislación de protección animal–. Bienestarismo versus abolicionismo: ¿una dicotomía? Fundamentos filosóficos de los derechos animales. La teoría jurídica de los derechos animales. Derechos animales y derechos humanos. Los derechos animales en la litigación. Los derechos animales en la legislación. Los derechos animales como un movimiento de justicia social. Traducción del inglés de Carolina Leiva Ilabaca. 2025. 392 pp.
ISBN 978-9915-684-58-1.
Para más información visite nuestra web.
Books
More Equal Than Others
by Raffael Fasel
Unprecedented demands have recently arrived at the doorstep of courts and parliaments the world over: nonhuman animals should receive some of the rights that have so far been reserved to human beings. This development has raised fundamental questions about the nature of legal rights, and who should have them.
More Equal Than Others: Humans and the Rights of Other Animals provides a sustained analysis of the fundamental rights of human and nonhuman animals to explore the issue of whether conferring fundamental legal rights to animals would undermine the equal status and rights of humans.
Raffael N Fasel proposes an unorthodox but practical solution to this issue: the Species Membership Approach (SMA). According to the SMA, legal rights and similar entitlements should be granted to animals based on the species to which they belong, not their individual capacities. By pioneering an approach that focuses on species membership rather than individual capacities, the author demonstrates how fundamental legal rights can be extended to nonhuman animals without threatening the status and equal rights of humans.
Learn more and purchase More Equal Than Others here.
Animals and the Constitution: Towards Sentience-Based Constitutionalism
by John Adenitire and Raffael Fasel
This book breaks new ground by challenging the human-centredness of current constitutional theory and practices. It pioneers a more capacious account of constitutionalism—sentience-based constitutionalism—which is grounded in respect for the interests of all governed sentient beings. The book demonstrates how this account can be implemented in modern constitutions by rethinking four key principles of constitutionalism: fundamental rights, proportionality, rule of law, and democracy. To illustrate how these principles can be reimagined to protect the interests of both humans and animals, the book draws on and examines numerous real-world examples, ranging from judicial recognitions of wild animals’ rights in Ecuador, to direct democratic votes on primate rights in Switzerland, to entire bills of rights proposals for animals in Finland. A unique combination of constitutional theory, animal ethics, and comparative constitutional law, the book offers a practical blueprint for future constitutions to address the moral and legal status of sentient beings.
Learn more and purchase Animals and the Constitution: Towards Sentience-Based Constitutionalism here.
