Summer Course

Bridging Animal Rights Theory & Practice

About the Summer Course

“Bridging Animal Rights Theory and Practice” is a unique 8-week live, online course that delves into the philosophical foundations of animal rights law.
Designed for students, legal professionals, advocates, and scholars, this course offers a critical exploration of how moral and political philosophy shape contemporary legal debates and reform agendas for animals.

Taught by renowned animal philosopher Dr Paulina Siemieniec, this course provides a rare opportunity to study with a leading scholar whose work lies at the intersection of care ethics, political theory, and the legal status of animals.

Through a series of guided lectures and discussions, participants will explore how theory and practice intersect—and how legal arguments can be strengthened through a robust understanding of philosophical concepts such as utilitarianism, deontology, care ethics, intersectionality, and abolitionism.

By the end of the course, students will be equipped to understand the relationship between animal rights theory and animal rights law, with particular attention to how philosophical arguments shape legal debates and strategies.

This live course, taught by Dr Paulina Siemieniec, will convene every Wednesday from 2 July 2025 to 20 August 2025, from 5 pm CET to 6:30 pm CET (Paris time).

Whether you are a student, animal advocate, researcher, policy-maker, or animal protection professional, this course provides a vital foundation for anyone looking to deepen their engagement with animal rights law from a theoretical and interdisciplinary perspective.

No prior background in law or philosophy is required. Participants will be supported throughout with accessible resources and structured discussions, and will test themselves via weekly quizzes.

Learning Objectives

This course is designed to equip participants with a critical and interdisciplinary understanding of the relationship between animal rights theory and legal reform.

By the end of the course, participants will be able to:

Identify & Describe

Identify and describe the principal moral and political theories that inform animal rights law and policy.

Understand

Understand the theoretical roots of key legal debates, such as animal personhood, standing, and representation.

Reflect Critically

Reflect critically on the strategic use of legal arguments within broader reform agendas.

Analyse

Analyse legal frameworks through a philosophical lens, considering their normative assumptions and implications.

Bridge Theory & Practice

Strengthen their capacity to bridge theory and practice in legal research, advocacy, and education.

Join us in shaping the future of animal rights through ethics & the law!

Summer Course Structure

The Summer Course “Bridging Animal Rights Theory and Practice” is structured over eight modules. Over the course of eight weeks, participants will explore a range of philosophical and legal themes that have shaped—and continue to shape—the field of animal rights law.

Each module includes 1.5 hours of live lecture, assigned readings, and a quiz. Each session will integrate real-world case studies and opportunities for interactive discussion. The course concludes with a final quiz.

To ensure a high-quality and interactive learning experience, the course is limited to a maximum of 30 participants. This small-group format is designed to foster genuine dialogue and to allow for more personalised engagement with the lecturer and other students. The course is conducted in English, and all participants who attend sessions and complete the quizzes will receive a certificate of completion.

About the Summer Course

  • Modalities

    Through live lectures, curated readings, and weekly quizzes, participants will gain knowledge and skills to bridge animal rights theory and practice. All live lectures will be taught in English via Zoom. Materials will be available on Google Classroom.

  • Coursework

    Participants should anticipate dedicating approximately 5 hours per week, for a total of 40 hours over the 8 modules (including readings, weekly 10-minute quizzes and a final test).

  • Skills

    Participants will strengthen their analytical and legal reasoning skills and improve their ability to construct clear, well-founded ethical and legal arguments. The course fosters strategic thinking in research and advocacy, encouraging learners to engage critically with real-world ethical and legal challenges.

  • Assignments

    Each module includes a 10-minute quiz to help participants apply key concepts, test their knowledge, and reflect on their progress across the course.

  • Evaluation

    A final quiz evaluates the knowledge acquired by the student across the Summer Course, and tests its practical application.

  • Certificate

    To earn the certificate of completion, participants must:
    - Attend a minimum of 75% of live lectures;
    - Complete the weekly quizzes and pass the final quiz.
    The certificate is awarded to participants who attend 75% of live lectures, complete all modules’ quizzes and the final quiz, and achieve a minimum overall score (60%).

Modules 1 & 2: 2 and 9 July 2025
Moral Status of Animals: Utilitarianism & Deontological Approach

The course begins by introducing foundational philosophical approaches to animal ethics that have shaped the emergence of animal rights discourse. In these two sessions, participants will examine how theorists such as Peter Singer and Tom Regan applied existing normative frameworks—utilitarianism and deontology—to the moral consideration of non-human animals.

Participants will explore central concepts, including the capacity to suffer and experience pleasure, the principle of equal consideration of interests, and the Kantian idea that beings should never be treated merely as a means to an end. These moral foundations provide the ethical grounding from which legal theorists and advocates have sought to challenge the status quo.

Module 3: 16 July 2025
Feminist Approaches to Animal Ethics

This session introduces feminist critiques of mainstream animal ethics and offers alternative frameworks that expand and deepen our understanding of moral obligation. Through ecofeminism and care ethics, participants will explore how speciesism is interwoven with other forms of systemic oppression, drawing on the work of scholars such as Carol J. Adams and Lori Gruen.

Particular attention will be paid to concepts often neglected in dominant rights and justice paradigms—namely, context, particularity, relationality, and the moral significance of emotion. This module begins to shift the conversation from abstract principles to situated, embodied, and affective forms of ethical reasoning.

Module 4: 23 July 2025
Legal Welfarism

Moving from moral theory to legal application, this module critically examines the dominant legal paradigm regulating human–animal relations: legal welfarism. Participants will analyse how legal welfarism functions to maintain the permissibility of animal use while appearing to safeguard animal interests.

Participants will interrogate the strategic, conceptual, and practical limitations of this approach and consider why many theorists argue for transitioning beyond welfare to a rights-based framework. This session provides the groundwork for understanding structural legal reform and the tensions between incrementalism and abolitionist strategies.

Module 5: 30 July 2025
The Right Not To Be Property

This module turns to the property status of animals and its foundational role in sustaining their legal marginalisation. Drawing from abolitionist theory and legal personhood debates, participants will examine the implications of framing animals as rights-holders and consider efforts to extend legal personhood to non-human animals.

Participants will reflect on whether—and how—dismantling the property paradigm is necessary for realising meaningful legal protection and justice for animals.

Module 6: 6 August 2025
Problematising Extensionist or Sameness Approaches

This session introduces a pivotal conceptual distinction that challenges the assumptions of previous frameworks: whether animals should be valued in proportion to their similarity to humans or on the basis of their own inherent characteristics. Participants will engage with two competing methodologies—the extensionist approach, which extends moral and legal consideration based on sameness to humans, and the vulnerability-based approach, which affirms animals as worthy of moral and political attention in their own right.

This session encourages critical reflection on how anthropocentric reference points shape legal thought and public policy, often to the detriment of animals.

Module 7: 13 August 2025
The Ethics of Mutual Avowal

Bringing intersectionality and anti-racism to the forefront, this module critically examines the relationship between human rights and animal rights movements. Participants will explore Claire Jean Kim’s concept of mutual dis/avowal and Aph Ko’s notion of multidimensionality to understand how comparative frameworks can both illuminate and obscure structural injustice.

This session asks how alliances can be built across movements in a way that avoids flattening or appropriating experiences of marginalisation, and how legal strategies might reflect a more ethically grounded form of solidarity.

Module 8: 20 August 2025
Animal Agency

The final session addresses one of the most pressing questions in contemporary animal rights theory and law: how can we understand, recognise, and legally represent animal agency? Participants will explore different approaches to legal representation and examine how political and legal theorists have debated the possibility and implications of acknowledging animals as agents.

This closing session brings together the course's core themes—moral status, personhood, justice, vulnerability, and solidarity—by asking what it means to treat animals as participants in the legal and political community, rather than as passive objects of protection.


About the Lecturer

Dr Paulina Siemieniec is an animal philosopher whose work lies at the intersection of ethics, law, and political theory. She holds a PhD from Queen’s University, where she studied under the supervision of Dr Will Kymlicka. Her doctoral research applied care ethics and disability theory to the question of political agency for animals.

Her recent research, developed during her time at the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law, breaks new ground by proposing a theoretical framework for sexual and reproductive rights for animals. She is currently an APPLE fellow and the author of several forthcoming peer-reviewed publications. She brings both scholarly rigour and deep ethical commitment to her teaching.

Registration and Fees

The course fee is €150 and includes access to all live sessions, digital course materials, and a certificate of completion. To ensure equitable access, ICARE is offering a limited number of full and partial scholarships.

We strongly encourage applications from individuals facing financial barriers, especially those from underrepresented regions or marginalised communities.

Registration will close on 30 June 2025, or earlier if the course reaches capacity. As enrolment is capped at 30 participants to preserve the interactive and small-group format, we encourage early registration to secure a place.

Full payment instructions will be provided upon registration. To register, please fill out the form below or contact us directly at courses@icare-animals.org if you have any questions about the process, eligibility, or scholarship availability.

150 EUR

Summer Course Fee


You can also donate to support scholarships for students in financial need.

Payment & Scholarship Options

You can make your payment via bank transfer or PayPal upon registration, or apply for a partial or full scholarship if you require financial support. Priority will be given to applicants from the Majority World.

Register for the Summer Course

Who should register?

This course is designed for anyone seeking to understand the philosophical foundations of animal rights law and how they inform legal and political strategies for change. It is particularly well-suited to individuals who wish to critically engage with the ethical and theoretical questions that underpin contemporary animal protection efforts.

You do not need a background in law or philosophy to benefit from this course. The content is structured to be accessible to a broad and diverse audience, while offering the intellectual rigour and depth expected of an advanced learning experience. Whether you are new to the field or looking to deepen your understanding, the course offers a rich space for learning, reflection, and engagement.

Law students and legal professionals will gain insight into the moral and political arguments that shape legal reform and litigation strategies. Philosophers, political theorists, and students of the humanities and social sciences will discover how abstract theories are applied in legal and policy contexts to advance the status and rights of animals. Advocates, campaigners, and NGO professionals will be equipped with conceptual tools to strengthen their arguments, refine their strategies, and communicate more effectively across disciplines and sectors.

The course also welcomes policy professionals, educators, and anyone working in animal protection or broader social justice movements who wish to bridge ethical theory with legal and political practice. It is ideal for individuals committed to intersectional approaches to justice, and for those seeking to build more just, inclusive, and principled frameworks for responding to the exploitation of animals.

In keeping with ICARE’s mission and values, we especially encourage registration from individuals whose perspectives and lived experiences have been underrepresented in legal and philosophical spaces. We believe that strengthening the field of animal rights law requires a diversity of voices, backgrounds, and approaches—and this course is designed to support that vision.