A year after the starting fight for legal personhood for
the research chimpanzees Hercules and Leo, the apes and their lawyers got their
day in court. At a hearing in Manhattan on Wednesday, a judge heard arguments
in the landmark lawsuit against Stony Brook University, with a decision
expected later this summer. At stake: the question of whether only human beings
deserve human rights.
A decision could set a precedent for challenging, under
human law, the captivity of other chimpanzees—and perhaps other species. It’s a
radical notion, and many legal experts doubted whether the lawsuit, one of
several filed late in 2013 by the Nonhuman Rights Project, would ever reach
court.
But Justice Barbara Jaffe decided to consider the
arguments. “The law evolves according to new discoveries and social mores,” she
said while presiding over the hearing. “Isn’t it incumbent on judiciaries to at
least consider whether a class of beings may be granted a right?”
Jaffe posed that question to New York assistant attorney
general Christopher Coulston, who represented the university, where the two
chimps are housed. Coulston had argued that Jaffe was bound by the previous
decisions of two appellate courts, which had ruled that other Nonhuman Rights
Project chimps didn’t qualify for habeas corpus, the legal principle that
protects people from illegal imprisonment.
Both those decisions are controversial. In one, judges
decided that habeas corpus didn’t apply because the chimp would be transferred
from one form of captivity to another—in this case, a sanctuary. But
illegally-held human prisoners have been released to mental hospitals, and
juveniles into the care of guardians.
In the other appeals court decision, judges declared that
chimps are not legal persons because they can’t fulfill duties to human
society. But that rationale arguably denies personhood to young children and
mentally incapacitated individuals, as several high-profile legal scholars,
including Constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe, pointed out. He filed a
brief on behalf of the Nonhuman Rights Project, saying the court “reached its
conclusion on the basis of a fundamentally flawed definition of legal
personhood.”
In fact, Nonhuman Rights Project attorney Steven Wise
argued, New York law only requires judges to follow appeals court decisions
involving settled legal principles—which animal personhood is not. That set the
stage for the pivotal question: What is the basis of legal personhood? Wise
said it’s rooted in the tremendous value placed by American society and New
York law on liberty, which is synonymous with autonomy. “The purpose of the
writ of habeas corpus isn’t to protect a human being,” he said. “It’s to
protect autonomy.”
By that standard, Wise said, chimpanzees qualify. “Chimps
are autonomous and self-determined beings. They are not governed by instinct,”
he said. “They are self-conscious. They have language, they have mathematics,
they have material and social culture. They are the kinds of beings who can
remember the past and plan for the future.” In a human, argued Wise, those
capacities are grounds for the right to be free.
Coulston marshalled an argument elsewhere made by Richard
Posner, a legal theorist and federal appeals court judge who has written that
legal rights and personhood were designed with only humans in mind. “Those
rights evolved in relation to human interests,” Coulston said. “I worry about
the diminishment of those rights in some way if we expand them beyond human
beings.”
The cognitive capacities of chimpanzees have been compared
to 5-year-old humans, said Coulston; how would the legal system handle animals
with minds comparable to a 3-year-old, or a 1-year-old? “This becomes a
question of where we’re going,” he said, with chimp personhood opening the
floodgates to lawsuits on behalf of animals in zoos or on farms, or even pets.
“The great writ is for human beings,” he said, “and I think it should stay
there.”
Wise countered by saying that denying freedom to an
autonomous being is itself a diminishment; it could even come back to bite us,
serving as rationale for limiting human freedom. He described the slippery
slope as a separate issue. Freedom—or at least sanctuary—for Hercules and Leo
is something to debate on its own merits, just as rights for any potentially
deserving human should be considered without regard for social inconvenience.
It is true, though, that success could lead to personhood
claims on behalf of other chimps, as well as other great apes, orcas and also
elephants, for whom the Nonhuman Rights Project is now preparing a case. More
than a third of Americans now support rights for animals.
Win or lose, Wise said at a press conference following the
trial, the hearing itself was a victory. “Many human beings have these kinds of
hearings,” he said. Chimpanzees “are now being treated like all the other
autonomous beings of this world.” Whether they’ll continue to get that
treatment will be up to Justice Jaffe. Or, more likely, whoever hears the
almost inevitable appeal of her decision.
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