WEBVTT 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I'd like to have you look at this pencil. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It's a thing. It's a legal thing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so are books you might have or the cars that you own. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They're all legal things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The great apes that you'll see behind me, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they too are legal things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, I can do that to a legal thing. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I can do whatever I want to my book or my car. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 These great apes, you'll see. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The photographs are taken by a man named James Mollison 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who wrote a book called "James & Other Apes." 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And he tells in his book how every single one them, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 almost every one of them, is an orphan 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who saw his mother and father die before his eyes. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They're legal things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that separates legal things from legal persons. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They don't count in law. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They don't have any legal rights. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They don't have the capacity for legal rights. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They are the slaves. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Legal persons are very visible to judges. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They count in law. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They may have many rights. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They have the capacity for an infinite number of rights. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And they're the masters. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Right now, all non-human animals 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 are legal things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 All human beings are legal persons. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But being human and being a legal person 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 On the one side, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 there have been many human beings over the centuries 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who have been legal things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Slaves were legal things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Women, children 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 were sometimes legal things. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 has been to punch a hole through that wall 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and begin to feed 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Alas, that hole has closed up. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, on the other side are legal persons, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but they've never only been limited to human beings. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In the United States, we're aware of the fact that corporations 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 are legal persons. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In pre-independence India, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that a mosque was a legal person. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and in 2012, just recently, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 who owned its own riverbed. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 when I had a full head of lush, brown hair, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and indeed I was moved by it, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because I had become a lawyer because I wanted to speak for the voiceless, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 defend the defenseless, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I'd never realized how voiceless and defenseless the trillions, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 billions of non-human animals are. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And I began to work as an animal protection lawyer. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And by 1985, I realized that I was trying to accomplish something 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that was literally impossible, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the reason being that all of my clients, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 all the animals whose interests I was trying to defend, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 were legal things. They were invisible. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It was not going to work, so I decided 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that the only thing that was going to work 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 was they had, at least some of them, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 had to also be moved through a hole that we could open up again in that wall 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and begin feeding the appropriate non-human animals through that hole 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 onto the other side of being legal persons. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, at that time, there was very little known about or spoken about 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 about truly animal rights, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 about the idea of having a legal person or a legal rights for a non-human animal, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and I knew it was going to take a long time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so, in 1985, I figured that it would take about 30 years 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 before we'd be able to even begin a strategic litigation, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 long-term campaign, in order to be able to punch another hole through that wall. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It turned out that I was pessimistic, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that it only took 28. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So what we had to do in order to begin was not only 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to write law review articles and teach classes, write books, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but we had to then begin to get down to the nuts and bolts 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 of how you litigate that kind of case. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So one of the first things we needed to do was figure out what a cause of action was, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a legal cause of action. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And a legal cause of action is a vehicle that lawyers use 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to put their arguments in front of courts. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It turns out there's a very interesting case 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that had been heard almost 250 years ago in London 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 called Somerset v Stewart, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 whereby a black slave had used the legal system 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and had moved from a legal thing to a legal person. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 I was so interested in it that I eventually wrote an entire book about it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 James Somerset was an eight-year old boy when he was kidnapped from West Africa. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 He survived the Middle Passage, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and he was sold to a Scottish businessman 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 named Charles Stewart in Virginia. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, 20 years later, Stewart brought James Somerset to London, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and after he got there, James decided he was going to escape. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so one of the first things he did was to get himself baptized, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because he wanted to get a set of godparents, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because to an 18th-century slave, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they knew that one of the major responsibilities of godfathers 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 was to help you escape. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so in the fall of 1771, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 James Somerset had a confrontation with Charles Stewart. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We don't know exactly what happened, but then James dropped out of sight. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 An enraged Charles Stewart then hired slave catchers 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to canvas the city of London, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 find him, bring him not back to Charles Stewart, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but to a ship, the Anna Marie, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that was floating in London Harbor, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and he was chained to the deck, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 where James was to be sold in the slave markets 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and be doomed to the three-to-five years of life that a slave had 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well now, James's godparents swung into action. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They approached the most powerful judge, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Lord Mansfield, who was Chief Judge of the Court of King's Bench, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and they demanded that he issue a common law write of habeus corpus 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 on behalf of James Somerset. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, the common law is the kind of law that English-speaking judges can make 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 when they're not cabinned in by statues or constitutions, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and a writ of habeus corpus is called the Great Writ, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 capital G, capital W, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and it's meant to protect any of us who are detained against our will. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 A writ of habeus corpus is issued. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The detainer is required to bring the detainee in 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and give a legally sufficient reason for depriving him of his bodily liberty. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Well, Lord Mansfield has to make a decision right off the bat, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because if James Somerset was a legal thing, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 he was not eligible for a writ of habeus corpus, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 only if he could be a legal person. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So Lord Mansfield decided that he would assume, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 without deciding, that James Somerset was indeed a legal person, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and he issued the writ of habeus corpus, and James's body was broad in 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 by the captain of the ship. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There were a series of hearings over the next six months. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 said that slavery was so odious, and he used the word "odious," 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that the common law would not support it, and he ordered James free. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 At that moment, James Somerset underwent a legal transubstantiation. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The free man who walked out of the courtroom 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 looked exactly like the salve who had walked in, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but as far as the law was concerned, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they had nothing whatsoever in common. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The next thing we did is that the Nonhuman Rights Project, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which we founded, then began to look at what kind of values and principles 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 do we want to put before the judges? 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 What values and principles did they imbibe with their mother's milk, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 were they taught in law school, do they use every day, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 do they believe with all their hearts? And we chose liberty and equality. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, liberty right is the kind of right to which you're entitled 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because of how you're put together, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and a fundamental liberty right protects the fundamental interest. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And the supreme interest in the common law are the rights to autonomy 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and self-determination. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So they are so powerful that in a common law country, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 if you go to a hospital and you refuse life-saving medical treatment, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a judge will not order it forced upon you, because they will respect 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 your self-determination and your autonomy. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, an equality right is the kind of right to which you're entitled 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 because you resemble someone else in a relevant way, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and there's the rub, relevant way. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So if you are that, then because they have the right, you're like them, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 you're entitled to the right. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, courts and legislatures draw lines all the time. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Some are included, some are excluded. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But you have to, at the bare minimum, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that line has to be a reasonable means to a legitimate end. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 The Nonhuman Rights Project argues that drawing a line in order 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to enslave an autonomous and self-determining being 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 like you're seeing behind me, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that that's a violation of equality. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We then searched through 80 jurisdictions, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 it took us seven years, to find a jurisdiction 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that we wanted to begin filing our first suit. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We chose the State of New York. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Then we decided upon who our plaintiffs are going to be. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We decided upon chimpanzees, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 not just because Jane Goodall was on our board of directors, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but because they, Jane and others, have studied chimpanzees 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 intensively for decades. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We know the extraordinary cognitive capabilities that they have, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and they also resemble the kind that human beings have. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so we chose chimpanzees, and we began to then canvas the world 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 to find the experts in chimpanzee cognition. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We found them in Japan, Sweden, Germany, Scotland, England, and the United States, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and amongst them, they wrote 100 pages of affidavits 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in which they set out more than 40 ways 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in which their complex cognitive capability, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 either individually or together, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 all added up to autonomy and self-determination. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, these included, for example, that they were conscious. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 But they're also conscious that they're conscious. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They know they have a mind. They know that others have a mind. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They know they're individuals, and that they can live. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They understand that they lived yesterday and they will live tomorrow. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They engage in mental time travel. They remember what happened yesterday. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They can anticipate tomorrow, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which is why it's so terrible to imprison a chimpanzee, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 especially alone: it's the things that we do to our worst criminals, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we do that to chimpanzees without even thinking about it. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They have some kind of moral capacity. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 When they play economic games with human beings, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they'll spontaneously make fair offers, even when they're not required to do so. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They are numerate. They understand numbers. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They can do some simple math. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They can engage in language or, to stay out of the language wars, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they're involved in intentional and referential communication 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in which they pay attention to the attitudes of those 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with whom they are speaking. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They have culture. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They have a material culture, a social culture. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They have a symbolic culture. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Scientists in the Taï Forests in the Ivory Coast 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 found chimpanzees who were using these rocks to smash open 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 incredibly hard hulls of nuts. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 It takes a long time to learn how to do that, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and they excavated the area and they found 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that this material culture, this way of doing it, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 these rocks, had passed down for at least 4,300 years 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 through 225 chimpanzee generations. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 So now we needed to find our chimpanzee. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Our chimpanzee, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 first we found two of them in the State of New York. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Both of them would die before we could even get our suits filed. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Then we found Tommy. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Tommy is a chimpanzee. You see him behind me. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Tommy was a chimpanzee. We found him in that cage. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We found him in a small room that was filled with cages 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in a larger warehouse structure on a used trailer lot 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 in central New York. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We found Kiko, who is partially deaf. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Kiko was in the back of a cement storefront in western Massachusetts. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And we found Hercules and Leo. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 They're two young male chimpanzees being used for biomedical, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 anatomical research at Stonybrook. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 we found them. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And so on the last week of December, 2013, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the Nonhuman Rights Project filed three suits 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 all across the State of New York 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 using the same common law writ of habeus corpus argument 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 that had been used with James Somerset, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we demanded that the judges issue 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 these common law writs of habeus corpus. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We wanted the chimpanzees out, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 and we wanted them brought to Save the Chimps, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 a tremendous chimpanzee sanctuary in South Florida 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 which involves an artificial lake with 12 or 13 islands. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 There are two or three acres where two dozen chimpanzees live on each of them. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And these chimpanzees would then live the life of a chimpanzee, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 with other chimpanzees in an environment that was as close to Africa as possible. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Now, all these cases are still going on. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We have not yet run into our Lord Mansfield. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 We shall. We shall. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 This is a long-term strategic litigation campaign. We shall. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 And to quote Winston Churchill, the way we view our cases is that 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they're not the end, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 they're not even the beginning of the end, 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 but they are perhaps 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 the end of the beginning. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 Thank you. 99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999 (Applause)