CPL Book launch: 'More Equal Than Others: Humans and the Rights of Other Animals'

The first CPL seminar for Easter term will take place on Tuesday, 23 April 2024, at 1:00pm. This will be a book launch of More Equal Than Others: Humans and the Rights of Other Animals (OUP 2024) authored by Raffael Fasel, followed by comments from Lena Holzer and David Feldman. You are welcome to attend in-person in the Moot Court Room or online.

To join online, please use the following Zoom details: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82455506483?pwd=34fOlJRbhDSQ3T7KKrDneIq1s08Wn6.1

Abstract: Unprecedented demands have recently arrived at the doorstep of courts and parliaments the world over: that 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 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.

This book examines the antithetical nature of the human rights and animal rights conceptions that have so far dominated the debate and demonstrates how a middle ground can be reached between these opposing conceptions. Informed by the forgotten history of animal and human rights in the French Enlightenment, More Equal Than Others radically reimagines the spectrum of fundamental rights conceptions.

Raffael Fasel is Yates Glazebrook Fellow, College Assistant Professor, and Director of Studies in Law at Jesus College, and Affiliated Lecturer at the Cambridge Law Faculty. He specialises in public law, with a particular interest in constitutional theory, human rights law, and animal rights law.

Lena Holzer is an Assistant Professor in Gender, Race and the Law in the Law Faculty at the University of Cambridge and serves as Sheila Lesley Fellow at Girton College. Her research focuses on critical feminist, queer and intersectional approaches to international law with a focus on human rights law and sports law.

David Feldman is Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of English Law and Emeritus Fellow of Downing College. His research interests cover a wide range of public law fields, using historical (including archival) alongside legal methods.