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School of Management and Law

Center for Animal Rights and the Environment (CARE)

The Center for Animal Rights and the Environment (CARE) is a research and learning centre dedicated to the study of animal rights and their interdependence with human rights and the environment. At CARE, we are concerned with the protection and status of animals in law and society, as well as the manifold interconnections between animal, human, and environmental rights and sustainability. Animal rights law investigates the current legal treatment of animals, the rights that animals (ought to) have, and future legal developments. Contemporary animal law increasingly operates in the context of pressing ecological challenges: zoonoses, climate change, species extinction. These require us to consider the interdependencies between humans, animals, and the environment and to develop new, holistic approaches, such as One Health or One Rights.

About us

Director

Dr. iur. Saskia Stucki

Saskia Stucki is a Senior Lecturer and Researcher at the ZHAW School of Management and Law and at the University of Zurich Law School. From 2016-2024, she was Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg). From 2018-2020, she was a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School, supported by an Advanced Postdoc.Mobility scholarship by the Swiss National Science Foundation. From 2012-2016, she was the coordinator of the doctoral programme “Law and Animals” at the University of Basel Law School.

Visiting researchers

We welcome expressions of interest from scholars whose work broadly connects with CARE’s research at the intersection of animal rights, human rights, and the environment. If you are interested in a visiting research stay with us, please get in touch with a brief outline of your proposed project, your CV, and your preferred dates. Visiting research stays are primarily self-funded, though limited scholarships may be available for scholars from the Global South.

Events

Projects

Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law

The Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law establishes the field of Global Animal Law, which engages with the legal status and protection of animals in today’s globalised world. It is co-edited by Anne Peters (MPIL Heidelberg), Kristen Stilt (Harvard Law School), and Saskia Stucki (ZHAW), and involves more than 130 authors from all over the world.

About the project

Defund Meat

Meat is a (perhaps the) symbol of contemporary, interrelated environmental and health crises: climate change, biodiversity loss, deforestation, pandemics, unhealthy and unsustainable diets, and institutionalized animal suffering. While (not) eating meat has long been cast as a private choice, it has become an increasingly politicized issue. This project critically examines the status quo of meat governance and envisions the future shape and instruments of a transformative meat governance.

About the project

Publications & Media

Publications

Saskia Stucki, Emerging Animal Rights and Their Anthropo-, Zoo- and Ecocentric Justifications, EJIL:Talk!, 23 April 2025

Saskia Stucki, André Nollkaemper, Cesare Romano & Anne Peters, The Heidelberg Declaration on Transforming Global Meat Governance, EJIL:Talk!, 13 March 2025

Saskia Stucki, One Rights: Human and Animal Rights in the Anthropocene (Springer 2023)

Saskia Stucki, Animal Warfare Law and the Need for an Animal Law of Peace: A Comparative Reconstruction, 71 American Journal of Comparative Law 189-233 (2023)

Saskia Stucki & Visa Kurki, Animal Rights, in: Mortimer Sellers & Stephan Kirste (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, 98-103 (Springer 2023)

Saskia Stucki, Zur Sache: Es geht um die Wurst, MaxPlanckForschung 1/2023, p 12-15

Saskia Stucki, Klimaschutz geht durch den Magen: Die Schweizer Massentierhaltungsinitiative und ihre klimapolitische Bedeutung, Verfassungsblog, 13 September 2022

Saskia Stucki, Guillaume Futhazar, Tom Sparks, Bruce Ackerman, Fatou Bensouda, Lalit Bhasin, David R. Boyd, Chunghwan Choi, Martyn Day, Eduardo Ferrer Mac-Gregor Poisot, Idayat Hassan, Donald W. Kaniaru, Helen Keller, Viviana Krsticevic, Antonio Oposa Jr, Anne Peters, Paulo Sérgio Pinto de Albuquerque, Flavia Piovesan, Caleb Pollard & Christina Voigt, World Lawyers' Pledge on Climate Action, 51 Environmental Policy and Law 371-376 (2021)

Saskia Stucki, Menschenrechte für Tiere: Zur Verrechtlichung einer Idee, deren Zeit gekommen ist, in: Frank Adloff & Tanja Busse (eds), Welche Rechte braucht die Natur? Wege aus dem Artensterben, 147-158 (Campus 2021)

Saskia Stucki, Towards a Theory of Legal Animal Rights: Simple and Fundamental Rights, 40 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 533-560 (2020)

Saskia Stucki & Tom Sparks, The Elephant in the (Court)Room: Interdependence of Human and Animal Rights in the Anthropocene, EJIL: Talk! 9 June 2020

Tom Sparks, Visa Kurki & Saskia Stucki, Editorial: Animal Rights – Interconnections with Human Rights and the Environment, 11 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 149-155 (2020)

Saskia Stucki, (Certified) Humane Violence? Animal Welfare Labels, the Ambivalence of Humanizing the Inhumane, and What International Humanitarian Law Has to Do with It, 111 AJIL Unbound 277–281 (2017)

Saskia Stucki & Juan C Herrera, Habea(r)s Corpus: Some Thoughts on the Role of Habeas Corpus in the Evolution of Animal Rights, International Journal of Constitutional Law Blog, 4 November 2017

Saskia Stucki, Die Nutzung kommt vor dem Schutz – und andere Lehren aus der neuen Küken-Rechtsprechung, 7 Rechtswissenschaft 521–541 (2016)

Saskia Stucki, Toward Hominid and Other Humanoid Rights: Are We Witnessing a Legal Revolution?, Verfassungsblog, 30 December 2016

Saskia Stucki, Grundrechte für Tiere: Eine Kritik des geltenden Tierschutzrechts und rechtstheoretische Grundlegung von Tierrechten im Rahmen einer Neupositionierung des Tieres als Rechtssubjekt (Nomos 2016)

 

Media