Eric Langborgh

     Ten years after the first course in animal law was offered at Pace Law School, the number of classes devoted to securing legal personhood rights for animals is beginning to swell.

    The law schools at Harvard and Georgetown have announced the formation of “Animal Rights Law” and “Animal Law,” respectively, for the Spring 2000 semester. With these additions, the number of law schools offering courses that explore legal rights for animals is at least thirteen.

    These announcements coincide with the advent of Peter Singer’s controversial occupancy of a bio-ethics professorship at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values.

    Singer—who holds the belief that “no objective assessment can support the view that it is always worse to kill members of our species who are not persons than members of other species who are”—has come under fire by pro-lifers for his favorable assessment of infanticide. Indeed, Singer has even made comments valuing the life of a “normal adult mouse” as equal to “the life of a normal adult member of our species.”

    Harvard Law’s new course does not address the ethics of abortion and infanticide like Singer does, but it does serve to blur the traditional line between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom. “The three year-old child would stand as a model for the kinds of rights for chimpanzees and bonobos,” explained Stephen Wise, who will be teaching “Animal Rights Law.” 

    Wise, a lawyer from the Boston area long-involved in the animal rights movement, told Campus Report that his course will compare the various civil rights movements of the past with the movement to secure animal rights. The course will explore “how humans that at one point did not have [legal rights] achieved them,” and will investigate the arguments used to either “deny rights” or “grant rights” to unfavored persons.

    “There is a thick, high legal wall that has been put up over hundreds of years with non-human animals on one side of it,” claimed Wise. He expounded that these animals “have no rights,” while “human beings, who are legal persons, have every kind of right you can imagine.” 

    The goal of animal law courses, then, is to knock down that wall. “Once that wall is breached, the question becomes, ‘what non-human animals should be entitled to what rights?’” Wise stated that in the future there should be no more walls, but a “movable divider” that can be moved as “science… changes our understanding of animals.”

    Georgetown Law’s course on animal law is geared more towards evaluating existing laws that maintain animals as property, but the course description reveals a further goal. “The seminar will discuss the concept of legal rights for animals” by reviewing articles that explore the philosophic justification for animal personhood.

    Existing anti-cruelty legislation, said the course’s instructor, Valerie Stanley, was crafted in the 1800s when animals were used for labor, thereby making them obsolete now. Yet she concludes that animal rights are on the cutting edge of civil rights.

    “Every time our society has to rethink whether we are going to include or exclude a certain group,” she claimed, “we throw up economic reasons why it’s not feasible to do so.” Added Stanley in an interview with Campus Report, “That’s been done with slavery. It’s been done with women. Animals, to a certain extent, could be considered the next frontier.”

    Alan Ray, the assistant dean for academic affairs at Harvard Law, explained that the burgeoning biotech industries and the advent of animal cloning for experimentation or commerce necessitate the exploration of the legal rights animals should have. “The right of animals, if there exists one, to the integrity of their body,” Ray explained, “could be a basis for claiming that tissue samples, for example, might not be taken ethically.”

    Pace University School of Law, noted for being the pioneer in animal law back in 1988, recently held a conference designed to explore the future of the legal rights for animals movement. Renowned primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall highlighted the conference in calling for legal rights and justice to be extended to the Great Apes—notably the chimpanzee, the gorilla, and the orangutan. She compared the caging of primates at zoos and their use in medical experiments with human slavery, and even condemned keeping animals as pets.

    “The attainment of legal rights for non-human animals,” pronounced Goodall, “will be another step towards establishing justice for all living beings on this planet that we all share.”

    Fellow conference-goer Jim Mason, an environmentalist author, journalist, and attorney, opined, “Emotionally, culturally, psychically, symbolically—just about any way you want to measure it—animals are the most vital beings among all the things in nature.”

    He added, “Phylogenetically speaking, [humans] are the youngest children of the great family of animals; it would do us very much good to grow up a bit and learn how to get along with the rest of the family.”

    “Humans have different kinds of rights depending upon level of cognition,” Wise elaborated for Campus Report. Just as “infants don’t have the same rights as adults” and “insane people” have fewer freedoms than “sane people,” said Weis, so animals should be given rights according to their cognitive abilities.

    This philosophy has taken off on campuses throughout America. Starting with the late Jolene Marion’s course at Pace Law, animal law courses expanded into Vermont Law, Hastings College of the Law (in San Francisco), California Western School of Law, John Marshall Law, Northwestern School of Law, and Tufts University’s Fletcher School of Law in the ‘90s.

    Some schools, such as Rutgers University School of Law at Newark, have more than just a solo course offered in animal law—they have whole programs. Rutgers’ Gary Francione has his students analyze the “human/non-human relationship.” Program participants, according to the program summary, take six credits per semester, or about one-half of the total academic credits per semester taken by the average law student.

    Francione is on the cutting edge of the animal rights movement, noting, among other things, that “humans are all too enamored with themselves” while he rejects the hierarchical “notion that animals [are] ‘inferior’” beings.

    In refuting the argument that their lack of language precludes animals from  legal rights, he has stated, “Neither can some severely impaired human beings, but we do not thereby conclude that we can eat (them)…, use them in experiments, or use them to make shoes.”

    To note that the influence of Peter Singer prevails through this movement is correct. For example, the course description for the undergraduate class at Georgetown, “Ethics and Animals,” reads, “We will examine utilitarianism, as elaborated by Mill and Singer” to discuss “our obligations towards animals” and rethink “our attitude about animal persons.”

    Many, like “Contemporary Moral Issues” at North Carolina State, group together “euthanasia, suicide, the death penalty, [and] the rights of animals.”

    At Seattle University, “Animal Rights and Environmental Ethics” uses the readings of Singer to analyze two debates: one, “between anthropocentrists (those who favor a human centered view of the world) and non-anthropocentrists”; and two, “the debate between moral individualists and ecoholists.”

    According to  the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), an animal rights group based in Washington, D.C., animal rights finds defenders in a wide variety of courses at both undergraduate and graduate institutions. As maintained by their website, animal rights are promoted in many course categories, including animal assisted therapy, animal welfare, biology, criminology and law, environmental studies and natural resources, history and humanities, natural science and nutrition, philosophy, physiology and psychology, religious studies, research ethics and sociology, and veterinary medicine and medicine.

    Animal rights and animal law courses in academia have rapidly expanded in a similar fashion to how women’s studies courses proliferated. What started out as a solitary course thirty years ago in women’s studies has ballooned into over 30,000 courses in over 600 programs, backed up by some 50 national feminist organizations.

    Indeed, it was those institutions, such as the National Organization for Women, that lead the drive for increasing women’s studies programs throughout academia. The animal rights movement already has ample representation in the form of groups like Animal Legal Defense Fund, Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), HSUS, and many others. 

    Student groups devoted to securing legal rights for animals abound, as well. Northwestern School of Law, University of Oregon, Chicago’s Kent School of Law, Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, Vermont Law School, UC-Davis Law School, New York University, Georgetown Law, Western New England College, and University of Denver College of Law all sport student groups dedicated to the fight for animal legal personhood. In addition, most major undergraduate institutions in the United States have a student chapter of PETA. 

    According to many professors teaching animal rights, legal rights for animals will be every bit the civil rights issue that feminist, homosexual, and minority rights are now. Few could have predicted the growth in those courses, even fewer the serious study now being undertook to treat animals as legal persons.

    As Pace Law’s Suzan Porto asserted, “It is a social justice movement.”