Visiting Professors Spring Semester 2024

Prof. Maneesha Deckha is Professor and Lansdowne Chair in Law at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. Her research expertise includes critical animal law, vegan ecofeminist theory, and postcolonial theory through which she explores possibilities for transformative legal change for animals situated in an intersectional justice framework.
Prof. Deckha’s work analyzes the gendered, culture, racialized, and species dimensions of law. She has published widely in law reviews, feminist journals, and edited collections. She has held the Fulbright Visiting Chair in Law and Society at New York University in relation to animal studies and currently directs the Animals & Society Research Initiative at the University of Victoria. She serves on advisory bodies relating to sociolegal studies, animal law, and feminist theory including at Social & Legal Studies and the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law.
Her manuscript entitled "Animals as Legal Beings: Contesting Anthropocentric Legal Orders" was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2021 and her open access documentary designed for high school and undergraduate screening, "A Deeper Kindness: Youth Activism in Animal Law", launched in October 2022
(Link to video).
Her current monograph project, supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, examines the lack of government regulation in favour of farmed animals as a rule of law violation and thus a matter of constitutional import.
While a Visiting Professor at the University of Zurich, Prof. Deckha is investigating the situation of animals in research laboratories from a critical animal law perspective, and is affiliated with the Centre for Animal Law and Ethics under the co-direction of Prof. Margot Michel and Prof. Brigitte Tag. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum.
Prof. Deckha is a graduate of McGill University, the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and Columbia Law School.

Prof. Botero holds a Juris Doctor (SJD) from Georgetown University, a Master of Laws (LLM) from Harvard University, and the Bar from the Universidad de los Andes, with licenses to practice law in Colombia and New York State. 
Prof. Botero's previous experience includes negotiating and litigating international trade disputes related to bilateral and multilateral trade and investment treaties signed by Colombia and conducting studies to measure comparative legal institutions in more than 100 countries - as Executive Director of the World Justice Project, Research Associate at Yale University, and as a consultant to the World Bank. 
Prof. Botero has been a visiting professor or lecturer at about a dozen universities around the world, including Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, Karolinska Institutet and the Max Planck Institute. His work has been cited or mentioned in over 2000 journals in more than 120 countries, including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Financial Times. 
Prof. Botero's areas of research include comparative legal institutions, judicial reform, access to justice, rule of law, and business and human rights issues.