WEBVTT 00:00:00.949 --> 00:00:03.550 I'd like to have you look at this pencil. 00:00:03.550 --> 00:00:06.407 It's a thing. It's a legal thing. 00:00:06.407 --> 00:00:09.379 And so are books you might have or the cars you own. 00:00:10.319 --> 00:00:12.258 They're all legal things. 00:00:12.258 --> 00:00:15.881 The great apes that you'll see behind me, 00:00:15.881 --> 00:00:19.549 they too are legal things. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:19.549 --> 00:00:23.822 Now, I can do that to a legal thing. 00:00:23.822 --> 00:00:26.631 I can do whatever I want to my book or my car. 00:00:26.631 --> 00:00:29.533 These great apes, you'll see. 00:00:29.533 --> 00:00:33.420 The photographs are taken by a man named James Mollison 00:00:33.420 --> 00:00:36.464 who wrote a book called "James & Other Apes." 00:00:36.464 --> 00:00:39.227 And he tells in his book how every single one them, 00:00:39.227 --> 00:00:41.525 almost every one of them, is an orphan 00:00:41.525 --> 00:00:45.140 who saw his mother and father die before his eyes. 00:00:46.110 --> 00:00:47.748 They're legal things. NOTE Paragraph 00:00:47.748 --> 00:00:50.441 So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall 00:00:50.441 --> 00:00:53.785 that separates legal things from legal persons. 00:00:53.785 --> 00:00:57.570 On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. 00:00:57.570 --> 00:00:59.520 They don't count in law. 00:00:59.520 --> 00:01:01.215 They don't have any legal rights. 00:01:01.215 --> 00:01:03.699 They don't have the capacity for legal rights. 00:01:03.699 --> 00:01:05.836 They are the slaves. 00:01:05.836 --> 00:01:08.660 On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. 00:01:08.660 --> 00:01:11.097 Legal persons are very visible to judges. 00:01:11.607 --> 00:01:13.312 They count in law. 00:01:13.312 --> 00:01:15.239 They may have many rights. 00:01:15.239 --> 00:01:18.142 They have the capacity for an infinite number of rights. 00:01:18.142 --> 00:01:20.510 And they're the masters. 00:01:21.300 --> 00:01:25.779 Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things. 00:01:25.779 --> 00:01:28.660 All human beings are legal persons. NOTE Paragraph 00:01:28.660 --> 00:01:31.469 But being human and being a legal person 00:01:31.469 --> 00:01:37.112 has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person. 00:01:37.112 --> 00:01:40.478 Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. 00:01:40.478 --> 00:01:43.358 On the one side, 00:01:43.358 --> 00:01:47.491 there have been many human beings over the centuries 00:01:47.491 --> 00:01:49.464 who have been legal things. 00:01:49.464 --> 00:01:50.997 Slaves were legal things. 00:01:50.997 --> 00:01:54.719 Women, children, were sometimes legal things. 00:01:55.499 --> 00:01:59.146 Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries 00:01:59.146 --> 00:02:03.659 has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed 00:02:03.659 --> 00:02:08.713 these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:08.713 --> 00:02:12.182 But alas, that hole has closed up. 00:02:12.772 --> 00:02:14.819 Now, on the other side are legal persons, 00:02:14.819 --> 00:02:18.952 but they've never only been limited to human beings. 00:02:18.952 --> 00:02:22.940 There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive. 00:02:22.940 --> 00:02:24.547 In the United States, 00:02:24.547 --> 00:02:28.540 we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons. 00:02:28.540 --> 00:02:30.515 In pre-independence India, 00:02:30.515 --> 00:02:33.139 a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person, 00:02:33.139 --> 00:02:35.200 that a mosque was a legal person. 00:02:35.200 --> 00:02:37.630 In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court 00:02:37.630 --> 00:02:41.173 held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person, 00:02:41.173 --> 00:02:43.472 and in 2012, just recently, 00:02:43.472 --> 00:02:47.233 there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand 00:02:47.233 --> 00:02:50.484 and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person 00:02:50.484 --> 00:02:53.525 who owned its own riverbed. NOTE Paragraph 00:02:53.525 --> 00:02:56.776 Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980, 00:02:56.776 --> 00:03:00.500 when I had a full head of lush, brown hair, 00:03:00.500 --> 00:03:03.088 and indeed I was moved by it, 00:03:03.088 --> 00:03:06.616 because I had become a lawyer because I wanted to speak for the voiceless, 00:03:06.616 --> 00:03:07.851 defend the defenseless, 00:03:07.851 --> 00:03:12.263 and I'd never realized how voiceless and defenseless the trillions, 00:03:12.263 --> 00:03:15.769 billions of nonhuman animals are. 00:03:15.769 --> 00:03:18.788 And I began to work as an animal protection lawyer. 00:03:18.788 --> 00:03:23.664 And by 1985, I realized that I was trying to accomplish something 00:03:23.664 --> 00:03:25.591 that was literally impossible, 00:03:25.591 --> 00:03:28.215 the reason being that all of my clients, 00:03:28.215 --> 00:03:31.697 all the animals whose interests I was trying to defend, 00:03:31.697 --> 00:03:34.182 were legal things; they were invisible. 00:03:34.182 --> 00:03:36.102 It was not going to work, so I decided 00:03:36.102 --> 00:03:40.066 that the only thing that was going to work was they had, at least some of them, 00:03:40.066 --> 00:03:43.864 had to also be moved through a hole that we could open up again in that wall 00:03:43.864 --> 00:03:47.440 and begin feeding the appropriate nonhuman animals through that hole 00:03:47.440 --> 00:03:50.986 onto the other side of being legal persons. NOTE Paragraph 00:03:50.986 --> 00:03:56.426 Now, at that time, there was very little known about or spoken about 00:03:56.426 --> 00:03:58.794 truly animal rights, 00:03:58.794 --> 00:04:03.235 about the idea of having legal personhood or legal rights for a nonhuman animal, 00:04:03.235 --> 00:04:06.005 and I knew it was going to take a long time. 00:04:06.005 --> 00:04:09.405 And so, in 1985, I figured that it would take about 30 years 00:04:09.405 --> 00:04:12.934 before we'd be able to even begin a strategic litigation, 00:04:12.934 --> 00:04:18.716 long-term campaign, in order to be able to punch another hole through that wall. 00:04:18.716 --> 00:04:24.556 It turned out that I was pessimistic, that it only took 28. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:26.801 --> 00:04:33.240 So what we had to do in order to begin was not only 00:04:33.240 --> 00:04:37.922 to write law review articles and teach classes, write books, 00:04:37.922 --> 00:04:40.890 but we had to then begin to get down to the nuts and bolts 00:04:40.890 --> 00:04:42.875 of how you litigate that kind of case. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:42.875 --> 00:04:46.908 So one of the first things we needed to do was figure out what a cause of action was, 00:04:46.908 --> 00:04:48.367 a legal cause of action. 00:04:48.367 --> 00:04:51.264 And a legal cause of action is a vehicle that lawyers use 00:04:51.264 --> 00:04:56.840 to put their arguments in front of courts. NOTE Paragraph 00:04:56.840 --> 00:04:59.744 It turns out there's a very interesting case 00:04:59.744 --> 00:05:04.348 that had occurred almost 250 years ago in London called Somerset vs. Stewart, 00:05:04.348 --> 00:05:07.444 whereby a black slave had used the legal system 00:05:07.444 --> 00:05:10.323 and had moved from a legal thing to a legal person. 00:05:10.323 --> 00:05:14.386 I was so interested in it that I eventually wrote an entire book about it. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:14.386 --> 00:05:19.773 James Somerset was an eight-year-old boy when he was kidnapped from West Africa. 00:05:19.773 --> 00:05:22.720 He survived the Middle Passage, 00:05:22.720 --> 00:05:27.894 and he was sold to a Scottish businessman named Charles Stewart in Virginia. 00:05:27.894 --> 00:05:32.102 Now, 20 years later, Stewart brought James Somerset to London, 00:05:32.102 --> 00:05:35.980 and after he got there, James decided he was going to escape. 00:05:35.980 --> 00:05:39.620 And so one of the first things he did was to get himself baptized, 00:05:39.620 --> 00:05:41.901 because he wanted to get a set of godparents, 00:05:41.901 --> 00:05:43.712 because to an 18th-century slave, 00:05:43.712 --> 00:05:46.870 they knew that one of the major responsibilities of godfathers 00:05:46.870 --> 00:05:48.982 was to help you escape. NOTE Paragraph 00:05:48.982 --> 00:05:52.998 And so in the fall of 1771, 00:05:52.998 --> 00:05:55.641 James Somerset had a confrontation with Charles Stewart. 00:05:55.641 --> 00:06:00.313 We don't know exactly what happened, but then James dropped out of sight. 00:06:00.313 --> 00:06:03.309 An enraged Charles Stewart then hired slave catchers 00:06:03.309 --> 00:06:05.550 to canvass the city of London, 00:06:05.550 --> 00:06:08.150 find him, bring him not back to Charles Stewart, 00:06:08.150 --> 00:06:14.173 but to a ship, the Ann and Mary, that was floating in London Harbour, 00:06:14.173 --> 00:06:15.793 and he was chained to the deck, 00:06:15.793 --> 00:06:17.797 and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica 00:06:17.797 --> 00:06:20.816 where James was to be sold in the slave markets 00:06:20.816 --> 00:06:24.299 and be doomed to the three to five years of life that a slave had 00:06:24.299 --> 00:06:27.150 harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica. 00:06:27.150 --> 00:06:30.359 Well now James' godparents swung into action. 00:06:30.359 --> 00:06:32.866 They approached the most powerful judge, 00:06:32.866 --> 00:06:36.512 Lord Mansfield, who was chief judge of the court of King's Bench, 00:06:36.512 --> 00:06:40.157 and they demanded that he issue a common law writ of habeus corpus 00:06:40.157 --> 00:06:41.991 on behalf of James Somerset. NOTE Paragraph 00:06:41.991 --> 00:06:45.962 Now, the common law is the kind of law that English-speaking judges can make 00:06:45.962 --> 00:06:50.099 when they're not cabined in by statutes or constitutions, 00:06:50.099 --> 00:06:52.695 and a writ of habeus corpus is called the Great Writ, 00:06:52.695 --> 00:06:54.762 capital G, capital W, 00:06:54.762 --> 00:06:59.290 and it's meant to protect any of us who are detained against our will. 00:06:59.290 --> 00:07:01.263 A writ of habeus corpus is issued. 00:07:01.263 --> 00:07:03.701 The detainer is required to bring the detainee in 00:07:03.701 --> 00:07:09.576 and give a legally sufficient reason for depriving him of his bodily liberty. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:09.576 --> 00:07:14.570 Well, Lord Mansfield had to make a decision right off the bat, 00:07:14.570 --> 00:07:17.354 because if James Somerset was a legal thing, 00:07:17.354 --> 00:07:20.419 he was not eligible for a writ of habeus corpus, 00:07:20.419 --> 00:07:22.439 only if he could be a legal person. 00:07:22.439 --> 00:07:25.457 So Lord Mansfield decided that he would assume, 00:07:25.457 --> 00:07:29.560 without deciding, that James Somerset was indeed a legal person, 00:07:29.560 --> 00:07:32.971 and he issued the writ of habeus corpus, and James's body was brought in 00:07:32.971 --> 00:07:34.482 by the captain of the ship. NOTE Paragraph 00:07:34.482 --> 00:07:37.183 There were a series of hearings over the next six months. 00:07:37.183 --> 00:07:43.011 On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield said that slavery was so odious, 00:07:43.011 --> 00:07:44.845 and he used the word "odious," 00:07:44.845 --> 00:07:48.723 that the common law would not support it, and he ordered James free. 00:07:48.723 --> 00:07:52.313 At that moment, James Somerset underwent a legal transubstantiation. 00:07:52.883 --> 00:07:54.943 The free man who walked out of the courtroom 00:07:54.943 --> 00:07:57.191 looked exactly like the slave who had walked in, 00:07:57.191 --> 00:08:02.330 but as far as the law was concerned, they had nothing whatsoever in common. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:02.790 --> 00:08:05.740 The next thing we did is that the Nonhuman Rights Project, 00:08:05.740 --> 00:08:09.250 which I founded, then began to look at what kind of values and principles 00:08:09.250 --> 00:08:12.128 do we want to put before the judges? 00:08:12.128 --> 00:08:16.007 What values and principles did they imbibe with their mother's milk, 00:08:16.007 --> 00:08:19.090 were they taught in law school, do they use every day, 00:08:19.090 --> 00:08:22.779 do they believe with all their hearts -- and we chose liberty and equality. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:22.779 --> 00:08:25.811 Now, liberty right is the kind of right to which you're entitled 00:08:25.811 --> 00:08:28.152 because of how you're put together, 00:08:28.152 --> 00:08:33.489 and a fundamental liberty right protects a fundamental interest. 00:08:33.489 --> 00:08:36.724 And the supreme interest in the common law 00:08:36.724 --> 00:08:40.765 are the rights to autonomy and self-determination. 00:08:42.015 --> 00:08:45.795 So they are so powerful that in a common law country, 00:08:45.795 --> 00:08:50.393 if you go to a hospital and you refuse life-saving medical treatment, 00:08:50.393 --> 00:08:52.640 a judge will not order it forced upon you, 00:08:52.640 --> 00:08:57.451 because they will respect your self-determination and your autonomy. NOTE Paragraph 00:08:57.451 --> 00:09:00.714 Now, an equality right is the kind of right to which you're entitled 00:09:00.714 --> 00:09:03.610 because you resemble someone else in a relevant way, 00:09:03.610 --> 00:09:05.601 and there's the rub, relevant way. 00:09:05.601 --> 00:09:09.339 So if you are that, then because they have the right, you're like them, 00:09:09.339 --> 00:09:11.684 you're entitled to the right. 00:09:11.684 --> 00:09:14.306 Now, courts and legislatures draw lines all the time. 00:09:14.846 --> 00:09:17.118 Some are included, some are excluded. 00:09:17.118 --> 00:09:23.260 But you have to, at the bare minimum you must -- 00:09:23.260 --> 00:09:27.695 that line has to be a reasonable means to a legitimate end. 00:09:27.695 --> 00:09:30.435 The Nonhuman Rights Project argues that drawing a line 00:09:30.435 --> 00:09:33.742 in order to enslave an autonomous and self-determining being 00:09:33.742 --> 00:09:35.530 like you're seeing behind me, 00:09:35.530 --> 00:09:38.560 that that's a violation of equality. NOTE Paragraph 00:09:39.270 --> 00:09:41.820 We then searched through 80 jurisdictions, 00:09:41.820 --> 00:09:44.065 it took us seven years, to find the jurisdiction 00:09:44.065 --> 00:09:46.271 where we wanted to begin filing our first suit. 00:09:46.271 --> 00:09:47.770 We chose the state of New York. 00:09:47.770 --> 00:09:50.392 Then we decided upon who our plaintiffs are going to be. 00:09:50.392 --> 00:09:52.258 We decided upon chimpanzees, 00:09:52.258 --> 00:09:55.109 not just because Jane Goodall was on our board of directors, 00:09:55.109 --> 00:09:58.862 but because they, Jane and others, 00:09:58.862 --> 00:10:01.582 have studied chimpanzees intensively for decades. 00:10:01.582 --> 00:10:05.158 We know the extraordinary cognitive capabilities that they have, 00:10:05.158 --> 00:10:08.292 and they also resemble the kind that human beings have. 00:10:08.292 --> 00:10:13.424 And so we chose chimpanzees, and we began to then canvass the world 00:10:13.424 --> 00:10:16.256 to find the experts in chimpanzee cognition. 00:10:16.256 --> 00:10:20.761 We found them in Japan, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, England and the United States, 00:10:20.761 --> 00:10:23.524 and amongst them, they wrote 100 pages of affidavits 00:10:23.524 --> 00:10:26.320 in which they set out more than 40 ways 00:10:26.320 --> 00:10:29.120 in which their complex cognitive capability, 00:10:29.120 --> 00:10:31.140 either individually or together, 00:10:31.140 --> 00:10:34.259 all added up to autonomy and self-determination. NOTE Paragraph 00:10:35.429 --> 00:10:38.936 Now, these included, for example, that they were conscious. 00:10:38.936 --> 00:10:41.283 But they're also conscious that they're conscious. 00:10:41.283 --> 00:10:44.139 They know they have a mind. They know that others have minds. 00:10:44.139 --> 00:10:46.682 They know they're individuals, and that they can live. 00:10:46.682 --> 00:10:49.975 They understand that they lived yesterday and they will live tomorrow. 00:10:49.975 --> 00:10:53.419 They engage in mental time travel. They remember what happened yesterday. 00:10:53.419 --> 00:10:54.870 They can anticipate tomorrow, 00:10:54.870 --> 00:10:59.587 which is why it's so terrible to imprison a chimpanzee, especially alone. 00:10:59.587 --> 00:11:02.184 It's the thing that we do to our worst criminals, 00:11:02.184 --> 00:11:06.955 and we do that to chimpanzees without even thinking about it. NOTE Paragraph 00:11:07.715 --> 00:11:10.426 They have some kind of moral capacity. 00:11:10.426 --> 00:11:13.352 When they play economic games with human beings, 00:11:13.352 --> 00:11:17.392 they'll spontaneously make fair offers, even when they're not required to do so. 00:11:17.392 --> 00:11:19.425 They are numerate. They understand numbers. 00:11:19.425 --> 00:11:20.805 They can do some simple math. 00:11:20.805 --> 00:11:24.869 They can engage in language -- or to stay out of the language wars, 00:11:24.869 --> 00:11:28.234 they're involved in intentional and referential communication 00:11:28.234 --> 00:11:30.721 in which they pay attention to the attitudes of those 00:11:30.721 --> 00:11:32.252 with whom they are speaking. 00:11:32.252 --> 00:11:33.710 They have culture. 00:11:33.900 --> 00:11:36.501 They have a material culture, a social culture. 00:11:36.501 --> 00:11:38.916 They have a symbolic culture. 00:11:38.916 --> 00:11:42.817 Scientists in the Taï Forests in the Ivory Coast 00:11:42.817 --> 00:11:46.346 found chimpanzees who were using these rocks to smash open 00:11:46.346 --> 00:11:49.132 the incredibly hard hulls of nuts. 00:11:49.132 --> 00:11:51.431 It takes a long time to learn how to do that, 00:11:51.431 --> 00:11:53.544 and they excavated the area and they found 00:11:53.544 --> 00:11:56.377 that this material culture, this way of doing it, 00:11:56.377 --> 00:11:59.720 these rocks, had passed down for at least 4,300 years 00:11:59.720 --> 00:12:04.712 through 225 chimpanzee generations. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:04.712 --> 00:12:07.104 So now we needed to find our chimpanzee. 00:12:07.104 --> 00:12:10.284 Our chimpanzee, 00:12:10.284 --> 00:12:13.187 first we found two of them in the state of New York. 00:12:13.187 --> 00:12:16.391 Both of them would die before we could even get our suits filed. 00:12:16.391 --> 00:12:18.272 Then we found Tommy. 00:12:18.272 --> 00:12:21.384 Tommy is a chimpanzee. You see him behind me. 00:12:21.384 --> 00:12:23.891 Tommy was a chimpanzee. We found him in that cage. 00:12:23.891 --> 00:12:27.351 We found him in a small room that was filled with cages 00:12:27.351 --> 00:12:32.537 in a larger warehouse structure on a used trailer lot in central New York. 00:12:32.537 --> 00:12:34.711 We found Kiko, who is partially deaf. 00:12:34.711 --> 00:12:40.353 Kiko was in the back of a cement storefront in western Massachusetts. 00:12:40.353 --> 00:12:42.250 And we found Hercules and Leo. 00:12:42.250 --> 00:12:43.953 They're two young male chimpanzees 00:12:43.953 --> 00:12:47.366 who are being used for biomedical, anatomical research at Stony Brook. 00:12:47.366 --> 00:12:48.671 We found them. NOTE Paragraph 00:12:48.671 --> 00:12:51.383 And so on the last week of December 2013, 00:12:51.383 --> 00:12:55.323 the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three suits all across the state of New York 00:12:55.323 --> 00:12:58.801 using the same common law writ of habeus corpus argument 00:12:58.801 --> 00:13:01.529 that had been used with James Somerset, 00:13:01.529 --> 00:13:06.616 and we demanded that the judges issue these common law writs of habeus corpus. 00:13:06.616 --> 00:13:08.727 We wanted the chimpanzees out, 00:13:08.727 --> 00:13:11.513 and we wanted them brought to Save the Chimps, 00:13:11.513 --> 00:13:15.461 a tremendous chimpanzee sanctuary in South Florida 00:13:15.461 --> 00:13:20.548 which involves an artificial lake with 12 or 13 islands -- 00:13:20.548 --> 00:13:23.411 there are two or three acres where two dozen chimpanzees live 00:13:23.411 --> 00:13:24.571 on each of them. 00:13:24.571 --> 00:13:27.521 And these chimpanzees would then live the life of a chimpanzee, 00:13:27.521 --> 00:13:31.923 with other chimpanzees in an environment that was as close to Africa as possible. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:31.923 --> 00:13:35.870 Now, all these cases are still going on. 00:13:36.820 --> 00:13:39.902 We have not yet run into our Lord Mansfield. 00:13:40.622 --> 00:13:42.230 We shall. We shall. 00:13:42.230 --> 00:13:46.110 This is a long-term strategic litigation campaign. We shall. 00:13:46.110 --> 00:13:48.225 And to quote Winston Churchill, 00:13:48.225 --> 00:13:52.393 the way we view our cases is that they're not the end, 00:13:52.393 --> 00:13:54.436 they're not even the beginning of the end, 00:13:54.436 --> 00:13:57.950 but they are perhaps the end of the beginning. NOTE Paragraph 00:13:58.580 --> 00:14:00.497 Thank you. NOTE Paragraph 00:14:00.497 --> 00:14:04.497 (Applause)