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Charlotte Blattner was a Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School from 2018-2020, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), to explore critical intersections of animal and environmental law. She earned her PhD in Law from the University of Basel, Switzerland, as part of the doctoral program “Law and Animals – Ethics at Crossroads”, and was a Visiting International Scholar at the Center for Animal Law Studies at Lewis & Clark Law School, Portland OR, in 2016. Her book Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders (Oxford University Press, 2019) is the first to address the challenges of animal law in an era of globalization. In animal law, regulatory gaps and fears of a race to the bottom have become a pressing issue of global policy, as corporations have relocated and the animal industry (agriculture, medical research, entertainment, etc.) has dispersed its production facilities across the territories of multiple states. Protecting Animals Within and Across Borders develops a comprehensive account of extraterritorial jurisdiction to respond to these developments, explores state and corporate duties owed to animals, and carves out the comparative advantages of constitutional, criminal, and administrative animal law – answering how and why extraterritorial jurisdiction can overcome the steepest hurdles for animal law and help us move toward a just global interspecies community.

From 2017-2018, Charlotte completed the Postdoctoral Fellowship for Animal Studies at the Department of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Kingston ON, under the supervision of Will Kymlicka. She taught the interdisciplinary course Animals and Society to a large class of undergraduate and graduate students. For her research at Queen’s, Charlotte focused on the ethical and political dimensions of animal labor, and organized a specialized workshop on the topic, exploring whether (and how) recognizing animals as workers could help advance rights, inclusion, and the political emancipation of animals. Together with Will Kymlicka and Kendra Coulter, she co-edited the volume Animal Labour: A New Frontier of Interspecies Justice?, which is in press at Oxford University Press.

Focal points of Charlotte’s research are international, environmental law, trade, and constitutional law as they intersect with animal law. In addition, she has widely published on issues of animal agency, animal research, animals’ standing in criminal procedure, the regulation of wild/liminal animals, animal personality in the law, and information/transparency crises. Charlotte’s research is published in the American Journal of International Law, Mid-Atlantic Journal on Law and Public Policy, Middle Eastern Journal of Law and Governance, Animal Law Review, Global Journal of Animal Law, Politics & Animals, Society & Animals, Journal of Animal Ethics, and others. Previously, Charlotte has worked as a research fellow for the Swiss Center for Expertise in Human Rights (SCHR) at the University of Zurich, and served as a law clerk for the Trial Court of the District of Liestal (BL), Switzerland.

Charlotte is currently senior lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Law, Institute of Public Law at the University of Berne, Switzerland, specializing in animal law, environmental law, and climate law.