Chimps have feelings and thoughts. They should also have rights

I'd like to have you look at this pencil.

It's a thing. It's a legal thing.

And so are books you might have
or the cars that you own.

They're all legal things.

The great apes that you'll see behind me,

they too are legal things.

Now, I can do that to a legal thing.

I can do whatever I want
to my book or my car.

These great apes, you'll see.

The photographs are taken by a man
named James Mollison

who wrote a book called
"James & Other Apes."

And he tells in his book
how every single one them,

almost every one of them, is an orphan

who saw his mother and father
die before his eyes.

They're legal things.

So for centuries, there's been
a great legal wall

that separates legal things
from legal persons.

On one hand, legal things
are invisible to judges.

They don't count in law.

They don't have any legal rights.

They don't have
the capacity for legal rights.

They are the slaves.

On the other side of that legal wall
are the legal persons.

Legal persons are very visible to judges.

They count in law.

They may have many rights.

They have the capacity
for an infinite number of rights.

And they're the masters.

Right now, all non-human animals

are legal things.

All human beings are legal persons.

But being human and being a legal person

has never been, and is not today,
synonymous with a legal person.

Humans and legal persons
are not synonymous.

On the one side,

there have been many human beings
over the centuries

who have been legal things.

Slaves were legal things.

Women, children

were sometimes legal things.

Indeed, a great deal of civil rights
struggle over the last centuries

has been to punch a hole
through that wall

and begin to feed

these human things through the wall
and have them become legal persons.

Alas, that hole has closed up.

Now, on the other side are legal persons,

but they've never only been
limited to human beings.

There are, for example, there are many
legal persons who are not even alive.

In the United States, we're aware
of the fact that corporations

are legal persons.

In pre-independence India,

a court held that a Hindu idol
was a legal person,

that a mosque was a legal person.

In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court

held that the holy books
of the Sikh religion was a legal person,

and in 2012, just recently,

there was a treaty between
the indigenous peoples of New Zealand

and the crown, in which it was agreed
that a river was a legal person

who owned its own riverbed.

Now, I read Peter Singer's book in 1980,

when I had a full head
of lush, brown hair,

and indeed I was moved by it,

because I had become a lawyer because
I wanted to speak for the voiceless,

defend the defenseless,

and I'd never realized how voiceless
and defenseless the trillions,

billions of non-human animals are.

And I began to work
as an animal protection lawyer.

And by 1985, I realized that I
was trying to accomplish something

that was literally impossible,

the reason being that all of my clients,

all the animals whose interests
I was trying to defend,

were legal things. They were invisible.

It was not going to work, so I decided

that the only thing that was going to work

was they had, at least some of them,

had to also be moved through a hole
that we could open up again in that wall

and begin feeding the appropriate
non-human animals through that hole

onto the other side
of being legal persons.

Now, at that time, there was
very little known about or spoken about

about truly animal rights,

about the idea of having a legal person
or a legal rights for a non-human animal,

and I knew it was going to take a long time.

And so, in 1985, I figured that it
would take about 30 years

before we'd be able to even begin
a strategic litigation,

long-term campaign, in order to be able
to punch another hole through that wall.

It turned out that I was pessimistic,

that it only took 28.

So what we had to do in order
to begin was not only

to write law review articles
and teach classes, write books,

but we had to then begin
to get down to the nuts and bolts

of how you litigate that kind of case.

So one of the first things we needed to do
was figure out what a cause of action was,

a legal cause of action.

And a legal cause of action
is a vehicle that lawyers use

to put their arguments in front of courts.

It turns out there's
a very interesting case

that had been heard
almost 250 years ago in London

called Somerset v Stewart,

whereby a black slave
had used the legal system

and had moved from a legal thing
to a legal person.

I was so interested in it that I
eventually wrote an entire book about it.

James Somerset was an eight-year old boy
when he was kidnapped from West Africa.

He survived the Middle Passage,

and he was sold to a Scottish businessman

named Charles Stewart in Virginia.

Now, 20 years later, Stewart
brought James Somerset to London,

and after he got there, James decided
he was going to escape.

And so one of the first things he did
was to get himself baptized,

because he wanted to get
a set of godparents,

because to an 18th-century slave,

they knew that one of the major
responsibilities of godfathers

was to help you escape.

And so in the fall of 1771,

James Somerset had a confrontation
with Charles Stewart.

We don't know exactly what happened,
but then James dropped out of sight.

An enraged Charles Stewart
then hired slave catchers

to canvas the city of London,

find him, bring him
not back to Charles Stewart,

but to a ship, the Anna Marie,

that was floating in London Harbor,

and he was chained to the deck,

and the ship was to set sail for Jamaica

where James was to be sold
in the slave markets

and be doomed to the three-to-five years
of life that a slave had

harvesting sugar cane in Jamaica.

Well now, James's godparents
swung into action.

They approached the most powerful judge,

Lord Mansfield, who was Chief Judge
of the Court of King's Bench,

and they demanded that he issue
a common law write of habeus corpus

on behalf of James Somerset.

Now, the common law is the kind of law
that English-speaking judges can make

when they're not cabinned in
by statues or constitutions,

and a writ of habeus corpus
is called the Great Writ,

capital G, capital W,

and it's meant to protect any of us
who are detained against our will.

A writ of habeus corpus is issued.

The detainer is required
to bring the detainee in

and give a legally sufficient reason
for depriving him of his bodily liberty.

Well, Lord Mansfield has to make
a decision right off the bat,

because if James Somerset
was a legal thing,

he was not eligible
for a writ of habeus corpus,

only if he could be a legal person.

So Lord Mansfield decided
that he would assume,

without deciding, that James Somerset
was indeed a legal person,

and he issued the writ of habeus corpus,
and James's body was broad in

by the captain of the ship.

There were a series of hearings
over the next six months.

On June 22, 1772, Lord Mansfield

said that slavery was so odious,
and he used the word "odious,"

that the common law would not support it,
and he ordered James free.

At that moment, James Somerset
underwent a legal transubstantiation.