Lawrence Tribe Supports Allowing Animals to Bring Lawsuits in Court
Lawrence Tribe is a Harvard law professor who has been suggested as a possible Supreme Court nominee if the Democratic Party retakes the White House. In other words, he is Establishment Law, not somebody on the fringe. In researching for my book, I just came across a journal article, taken from a speech Tribe gave at Faneuil Hall in Boston, in which he sure seems to support giving animals standing to bring lawsuits in their own names. Claiming a "deep intuition that chimps and dolphins and dogs and cats are infinitely precious--like ourselves," Tribe states :...[E]xisting state and federal statutes depend on enforcement by chronically underfunded agencies and by directly affected and highly motivated people--and that's just not a sufficiently reliable source of protection. Recognizing that animals themselves by statute as holders of rights would mean that they could sue in their own name and in their own right...Such animals would have what is termed legal standing. Guardians would ultimately have to be appointed to speak for these voiceless rights-holders, just as guardians are appointed today for infants, or for the profoundly retarded...But giving animals this sort of 'virtual voice' would go a long way toward strengthening the protection they will receive under existing laws and hopefully improved laws, and our constitutional history is replete with instances of such legislatively conferred standing.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 4:40 PM
3 Comments
3 Comments:
But if they want this kind of chaos, then it means they want an end to the kind of civilization we know works (to some extent anyway). I still think the animal lib types are the biggest self-haters on the planet. You'd have to really dispise yourself to want all humans to be considered nothing more than educated meat.
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The lack of ‘standing’ for animals, is not only the most obvious instance of speciesism in law (an animal is devoid of legal rights for no other reason than its species); but is also the key obstacle that must be overcome if our social and ethical progress is to be reflected in law. Intellectually impaired humans are given full legal standing through their appointed guardians; but non-human animals of equal (or greater) intellectual, emotional and physical capacity, are not. By recognising the standing of some animals (for instance, mammals) we will open the door to recognising their most basic rights – such as the right not to suffer. However, this door is definitely not a floodgate. In view of the very gradual development of human rights, aside from likely progress toward legal recognition and interpretation of the internationally accepted ‘Five Freedoms’ of animals (freedom from hunger and thirst; freedom from discomfort; freedom from pain; freedom from injury and disease; freedom to express normal behaviour; and freedom from fear and distress); more extensive legal rights for animals cannot be expected anytime soon.
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