Charlotte Blattner is a PhD candidate in her third year of studies at the Law Faculty of the University of Basel, Switzerland. The doctoral program “Law and Animals: Ethics at Crossroads” she participates in is the first doctoral program worldwide to enable doctrinal research in animal law. Ms. Blattner is an MLaw and specializes in general public international law, private international law, and international economic law – fields which she has sought to make use of for the further development of animal law in her publications. In her dissertation, Ms. Blattner studies the extraterritorial protection of animals as a means to counter the continuing trend of outsourcing animal exploitation to countries with lax animal laws, and as a response to the many socioeconomic challenges faced by animal law in a globalized world.
Ms. Blattner has obtained a Doc.CH grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) to conduct her research full time and is currently visiting the Center for Animal Law Studies (CALS) as this year’s Visiting International Scholar. She also serves as a writer and legal consultant to Sentience Politics, an anti-speciesist political think-tank of the Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF), based in Berlin, Germany. Prior to her PhD studies, Ms. Blattner has participated in the Jessup International Law Moot Court in Washington D.C., interned at the Court of First Instance in Liestal, Switzerland, and served as legal research assistant to the Swiss Competence Centre for Expertise in Human Rights (SCHR) at the University of Zurich.