Sarah Wilson

Dr Sarah Wilson (LLB; MA; PhD) is a Reader in Law at York Law School, University of York, in the UK. She holds degrees in both Law and History, and her key research and teaching interests and expertise lie in Financial Law (Financial Regulation, especially Banking and financial systems, and Financial Crime), Trusts Law, and a "Law and History" combination of Legal History (both traditional and critical) and Modern British History. Sarah is also passionate about Legal Education, and is currently publishing several perspectives on the role of legal education in promoting universities as societal institutions, through encouraging a stronger grounding for universities within the wider community, centrally through reference to aspirations of citizenship and social justice awareness.

Although the pressures and constraints of academic life have limited Sarah's active professional engagement in the 'Animals and Law' space, she has made many conference presentations in this sphere, including:

• "Promoting non-human animal advocacy in UK Universities: Some perspectives on the role of Law Schools in creating narratives of 'animal justice' as 'social justice'", EACAS 2025, House of Democracy and Human Rights, Berlin, May 2025;
• 'Dogs, Owners and Responsibility: Perspectives from Charity Law, past, present and future', Dogs, Owners & Responsibility: Law in the Doghouse? University of Birmingham, June 2014;
• 'Animals and Law: Welfare/rights discourse, and contributions from English Charity Law, past, present and future', Association of Law, Property and Society (ALPS), Maastricht University, June 2018;
• 'Animals and English Charity Law: Gender and Class Dimensions' Wills, Trusts and Estates Meets Gender, Race and Class, Wisconsin Law Review Symposium, Wisconsin Law School, Madison, October, 2018;
• "Challenging 'Human-centricity' in 'Animal Law' for the 21st Century: A case study of companion animals and perspectives from English Charity Law, past, present and future" Animal Law Conference 2021 (A-Law 2021).

Sarah's interest in human-non-human animal relations is grounded in being vegan for 30 years, and also in how she is active in supporting rescue, particularly of small companion animals (especially psittacine birds) kept in captivity. She works with several local rescues and has a very small home-based sanctuary of her own. Whilst Sarah's professional life has provided limited opportunity for focusing her work and reputation on legal aspects of human-non-human animal relations, her embeddedness in legal academia has encouraged her to think about how law can be used in different and creative ways to fight for animal rights. For this, Sarah has taken a different path from many interested in 'animal law', where legal academic interest is strongly framed in law's intersections with rights-based, or ethics and philosophical perspectives. Here, her expertise in charity law has provided the mechanism to reflect on human-non-human relations in society in Britain through social and legal constructions of charity, which can be found embodied in English charity law. A further perspective comes from ideas of legal personhood; examining historical foundations and present-day presentations of how the law 'sees', recognizes, and includes, and otherwise.