The great 1772 common law case of the slave James Somerset against his master Charles Steuart abolished human slavery in England and sparked a legal conflagration that within decades consumed human slavery everywhere in the Western world. When the presiding judge, the great Lord Mansfield, observed that Charles Steuart was claiming James Somerset as his property, Somerset’s lawyer, Serjeant “Bull” Davy, replied that “this is as great a question and perhaps a question of as much consequence as can come before this or any court of justice.”
For years the Nonhuman Rights Project has been preparing to litigate the most far-reaching and important legal question that has ever been litigated concerning nonhuman animals: whether, and to what extent, a nonhuman animal has the capacity to possess legal rights under the common law, and what rights she should have.
The common law is a step-by step process that, in Mansfield’s words, ceaselessly “works itself pure.” It rights the most egregious wrongs first. Then it turns to the harder questions. The Nonhuman Rights Project is initially focusing on breaching the great legal wall that separates all nonhumans, who are legal things without rights and invisible to the civil law, from all human beings who, in the twenty-first century are legal persons possessing a vast array of rights indeed.
The most powerful ram to breach that wall is the litigating of the capacity for legal rights of those nonhuman animals who are both the most cognitively complex (they have extraordinary minds) and the most cognitively similar to humans.
These include the four species of great apes, dolphins and whales, elephants, and African Grey parrots. The wrongs we do them by ignoring their just claims to legal rights are the most terrible.
Next: Exploring the Legal Case
