Animal Rights Law

Do animals have legal rights? This pioneering 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 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.

The book's companion website (bloomsbury.pub/animal-rights-law) provides access to briefs on the latest developments in this fast-changing area, and gives readers the tools to investigate their own legal systems with a list of key references to the latest cases, legislation, and jurisdiction-specific bibliographic references.

Rich in exercises and study aids, this easy-to-use introduction is a prime resource for students from all disciplines and for anyone else who wants to understand how animals are protected by the law.

Raffael Fasel is Assistant Professor-elect in Public Law at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, UK.

Raffael completed his PhD in Law at the University of Cambridge (Sidney Sussex College) and was a Fellow in Law at the LSE. He obtained an LLM from Yale Law School, an MA in Philosophy from UCL, and holds a Bachelor of Law and a Master of Law degree from the University of Fribourg.

Raffael supervises Roman Law and lectures Animal Rights Law in the Cambridge Law Faculty, and is Executive Director of the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law.

Sean C Butler is Emeritus Fellow and Director of Studies in Law at St Edmund's College, Cambridge, UK.

Sean studied Law at the University of 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 supervises Roman Law and lectures Animal Rights Law in the Cambridge Law Faculty, and is Director of the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law.