Dr Raffael Fasel

Raffael is Yates Glazebrook Fellow and College Assistant Professor in Law at Jesus College and holds a £440,000 grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation for his research in constitutional theory.

Academic interests

Raffael’s academic interests include: 

• Constitutional theory and comparative constitutional law
• Human and animal rights law
• Jurisprudence
• Intellectual history.

Degrees obtained

• Bachelor of Law, University of Fribourg.
• Master of Law, University of Fribourg.
• MA in Philosophy, UCL.
• LLM, Yale Law School.
• PhD, University of Cambridge.

Awards and prizes

• Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Grant (2021).
• Yorke Prize of the University of Cambridge Faculty of Law for a thesis of ‘exceptional quality’ (2020).
• Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Mobility Scholarship (2019).
• Swiss National Science Foundation Doctoral Mobility Scholarship (2016).
• Fulbright Scholarship (2013).
• Janggen-Pöhn Foundation Academic Career Scholarship (2013).

Biography

Raffael Fasel is Yates Glazebrook Fellow 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.

Raffael was previously Fellow in Law at the London School of Economics and he has held visiting scholar positions at Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, the University of Oxford, and NYU Law School. In 2021, he was awarded a £455,000 grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation for his research in constitutional theory, for which he is affiliated with the University of Zurich. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Fribourg with a Bachelor of Law and a Master of Law degree, obtained an MA in Philosophy from University College London, an LLM (with straight Honors) from Yale Law School on a Fulbright scholarship, and a PhD in Law from the University of Cambridge, for which he was awarded a Yorke Prize.

He is the author and co-author of three books. His PhD book, More Equal Than Others: Humans and the Rights of Other Animals (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), has been praised as ‘marvellous, a readable and immensely persuasive argument’ (Conor Gearty, LSE) and as ‘required reading’ that is ‘theoretically nuanced and deep, yet ultimately quite practical in its implications’ (Douglas Kysar, Yale Law School). Raffael is also the co-author of Animals and the Constitution: Towards Sentience-based Constitutionalism (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), and Animal Rights Law (Hart Publishing 2023), the first textbook of its kind, which is currently being translated into Spanish and French.

Raffael’s academic work has been published or is forthcoming in leading scientific journals such as the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Modern Law Review, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law, and his popular writing has been published in the Times Literary Supplement and other outlets with a wider reach.

During his doctoral studies, Raffael co-founded the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law and currently serves as its Executive Director. Raffael is also an Associate Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics.