The fate of two chimpanzees used by Stony Brook University became a test case for courts to consider nonhuman animals as persons with some legal rights as a state judge entered an order of habeas corpus on their behalf last July, thereby pushing forward a movement toward greater animal equality.
While panelists generally agreed on the end result—humane treatment—for the chimps, the tactics used to protect their interests enlivened the Natural Law Colloquium on “The Law, Science, and Ethics Behind the Nonhuman Rights Project and Its Struggle to Achieve Fundamental Legal Rights for Nonhuman Animals” on October 8. The annual forum is jointly sponsored by the Law School and Fordham University’s Philosophy Department.
On one end of the groundbreaking case from summer 2015 stood Steven Wise, the founder of the Nonhuman Rights Project, who argued that, based on principles of equality, the chimpanzees were entitled to the right to bodily liberty and, therefore, release from the laboratory at Stony Brook University where researchers used them for non-medical locomotion analysis. On the other side, the state maintained that animals like chimpanzees could not enjoy the same rights as humans because they could not fulfill other requirements of human laws.
Wise explained how his organization had researched statutes across all 50 states and found New York the most hospitable to bring an animal rights case because of the inapplicability of res judicata in such cases and thus the opportunity for plaintiffs to undertake an inexhaustible number of appeals. He then found four chimps, Tommy and Kiko, who were living in cages on private property in upstate New York, and Hercules and Leo, the property of Stony Brook’s anatomy lab, and filed a lawsuit arguing wrongful imprisonment.
“I envision this legal wall where, on one side, there are persons who have a million legal rights and on the other, there are things that have no rights. Two hundred years ago slaves were on the ‘things’ side of the law; women and children were on the ‘things’ side of the law,” Wise said. “Many of the greatest civil rights victories have been achieved when people punch a hole in that wall. I aim to punch a hole in that wall.”
Panelists, however, disagreed with Wise’s application of “personhood” to the chimps. David Cassuto, a law professor and the director of the Brazil American Institute for Law and Environment (BAILE) at Pace University Law School made the argument that the treatment of animals was best served when they were considered in legal areas such as property law and environmental law, sectors in which the legal community would likely have more of an interest to codify their protection.
“Corporations are legal persons; boats are legal persons. The law recognizes that all these legal things are persons, but there has never been a law that has really said what a person is or if you need rights in order to be a person,” Cassuto said. “We should talk about what rights are, and the requirements necessary to give animals the rights they deserve as members of the moral community.”
Fordham philosophy professor John Davenport asked the attorneys for a third way: status between that of full person, standardly capable of autonomy, and a mere thing, standardly disposable at will, in American law.
“If a human adult had just this set of mental capacities claimed for the chimps, but lacked awareness of right and wrong or higher-order will, it seems clear that American courts would not allow her to be the involuntary subject of scientific experiments, even though they would not allow her to sign contracts or to vote either,” Davenport said. “Maybe this right to bodily integrity protecting such an agent from experimentation is all that Wise’s Non-Human Rights group needs? If so, it might be better for Wise’s group to lay out different levels or types of dignity-status and claim only that status for the chimps that implies the intermediate level of bodily rights.”
Ultimately, New York County Supreme Court Justice Barbara Jaffe agreed. Although she initially ordered the writ of habeas corpus, she accepted the argument of the Assistant Attorney General that a chimp was not a “person” because he could not bear duties and responsibilities, thus prompting the Nonhuman Rights Project to file an appeal to the State Supreme Court.
But Wise at least had a gain in the court of public opinion: Stony Brook University indicated at the end of July that it would no longer experiment on Hercules and Leo, and the Nonhuman Rights Project entered negotiations with the university and with Hercules’ and Leo’s “owner,” the New Iberia Research Center, to have them transferred to Save the Chimps.
“Natural law theorists tend to believe that moral and ethical values are knowable and that the law ought to be crafted in a manner that aspires to embody and elaborate these values. Mr. Wise and other nonhuman rights lawyers and activists believe that—as a matter of basic moral values—some nonhuman animals are entitled to be treated with dignity, just as human beings are,” said Benjamin Zipursky, the James H. Quinn ’49 Chair in Legal Ethics. “They follow through on these moral convictions the way that some natural lawyers would, by aiming to have the law reflect these values by protecting nonhuman animals just as human animals are legally protected.
“Nonhuman rights lawyers could therefore be seen as one important cutting edge of natural law thinking.”
–Adrian Brune
