Saskia Srucki headshot

Saskia Stucki Visiting Scholar

Dr. Saskia Stucki is a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg), where she is working on her Habilitation project on Climate Mainstreaming. In 2018 and 2019, she was a visiting scholar at the Harvard Animal Law & Policy Program, where she worked on her postdoctoral research project “Trilogy on a Legal Theory of Animal Rights” (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation). From 2012 to 2016, she was the coordinator of the doctoral programme “Law and Animals” at the University of Basel Law School.

Saskia studied law at the University of Basel, where she also obtained her PhD in 2015. The resulting book on Fundamental Rights for Animals (Grundrechte für Tiere, Nomos 2016) received four awards, among them the biennial award of the Swiss Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Her research interests include animal rights; human rights; legal philosophy; international humanitarian law; and environmental and climate change law. Her work has been published (or is forthcoming) in the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, American Journal of Comparative Law, and Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, inter alia. She is co-editor (with Anne Peters and Kristen Stilt) of the Oxford Handbook of Global Animal Law (Oxford University Press, 2023).

During her research stay at the Animal Law & Policy Program in Spring 2022, Saskia will be finishing her book manuscript, entitled “One Rights: Human and Animal Rights in the Anthropocene”. This book investigates emerging animal rights as a phenomenon of so-called “new human rights” and advances a holistic understanding of the indivisibility and interdependence of human and animal rights under a novel “One Rights” approach.

During her visiting fellowship at Harvard Law School, she will be working on a “Trilogy on a Legal Theory of Animal Rights” – a research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. The overarching goal of this project is to develop a novel and comprehensive legal theory of animal rights. By rethinking the idea of animal rights through legal methodology and theories, it aims to furnish a coherent conceptual vocabulary for discussions of legal animal rights. As legally recognized animal rights have recently begun to emerge and materialize in case law, theorizing the conceptual foundations of legal animal rights has become particularly important at this point in time.