Odile Ammann Visiting Scholar
Odile Ammann is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law, Criminal Science, and Public Administration of the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). She holds a PhD in law from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, where she was a Fulbright scholar in 2015-2016.
Her fields of interest include constitutional law, public international law, EU law, and legal theory. In her current research, she explores the constitutional foundations of legislative lobbying from a comparative perspective, with a particular focus on Switzerland, France, the United States, and the European Union. Her recent publications focus on selected constitutional aspects of the regulation of legislative lobbying and campaign finance, and on the interface between public law and criminal law in the field of lobby regulation. She has also written about topics such as academic freedom, judicial independence, and citizenship law.
During her research stay at the Animal Law & Policy Program, Odile will work on an animal law-related project titled “The Power of Agricultural Interest Groups in Legislative Processes”. She will also conduct research on both agricultural lobbying and lobbying for animals for a monograph she is currently writing, provisionally titled Influencing Lawmakers: The Constitutional Foundations of Parliamentary Lobbying.
Besides her academic activity, Odile is a member of the board of trustees of the Swiss Study Foundation, a member of the Young Academy of the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences (2020-2025), and a board member of the Swiss Section of the International Commission of Jurists.
Before taking up her position at the University of Lausanne, Odile was a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in public law at the University of Zurich. Prior to that, she was a doctoral researcher at the University of Fribourg, where she wrote a dissertation titled Domestic Courts and the Interpretation of International Law: Methods and Reasoning Based on the Swiss Example under the supervision of Professor Samantha Besson. During this time, she completed research stays at Harvard Law School, the University of Oxford, and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg. These research stays were made possible by the financial support of the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Fulbright Foreign Student Program, Harvard Law School, and the Janggen-Pöhn Foundation. Odile studied law at the University of Fribourg (in French and German) and at the Centre for Transnational Legal Studies in London.
Some of Odile Ammann’s published work can be accessed here.