People

Macarena Montes Franceschini is an LL.M. candidate at Harvard Law School (expected May 2026). From February 2023 to August 2025, she was a Rights of Nature Fellow at the Brooks McCormick Jr. Animal Law & Policy Program at Harvard Law School. She holds a Ph.D. in Law from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, 2022) and has been a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg (2021). She is a board member of the Harvard Animal Law Society and the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics, editor of Law, Ethics and Philosophy (LEAP), serves on the editorial committees of the Animal Ethics Review and the Chilean Journal of Animal Law, and is treasurer of the Great Ape Project–Spain. She is the author of Animal Law in Chile and several articles on animal personhood, animal rights, and the rights of nature.

REPRESENTATIVE PUBLICATIONS

• “Traditional Conceptions of the Legal Person and Nonhuman Animals.” Animals 12 (2022): 1-16.
• “Animal Personhood: The Quest for Recognition,” Animal & Natural Resource Law Review 17 (2021): 93-150.
• “The Elephant in the Courtroom: On Legal Personhood and Animal Rights,” Juriste International 1 (2021): 32-35.
• “Legal Personhood: The Case of Chucho the Andean Bear,” Journal of Animal Ethics 11(1) (2021): 36-46.