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Chimpanzee "Personhood" Lawsuits Fail In New York Courts
sciencehabit writes "Three lawsuits filed last week that attempted to achieve 'legal personhood' for four chimpanzees living in New York have been struck down. The suits, brought by the animal rights group the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), targeted two chimps on private property and two in a research lab at Stony Brook University in New York. NhRP says it will now appeal each lawsuit to a higher court, and that it will continue its campaign to grant chimpanzees, dolphins, and other cognitively advanced animals legal personhood nationwide."
ok, so they free all the smart animals. what next?
send them back to the wild to fight for food and die fast?
Was not available for comment
At least chimps can still comment on /.
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
The basis for their case is saying that African-Americans are no better than chimpanzees and since African-Americans have rights, chimpanzees should as well. Oh, they dress it up differently and try to make it sound like that is not what they are claiming, but that is what the case law they cited amounts to.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Considering that chimps are as intelligent (at least) as two and three year olds, I think they should be given the same sort of rights. The right not to be tortured, and mistreated for one.
Oh but they are beasts and awful, and rape and stuff. Yeah, humans are horrible aren't they.
Humans aren't special. Get over yourselves.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
It's about people trying to force their extreme beliefs on others. If they were seriously interested in the humane treatment of animals, they would be pushing for tighter restrictions on mistreatment and better living conditions of corporate farm animals. At least put the court tax dollars to some better use than trying to push your "religion" on people.
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Human society is not ready to grant intelligent animals sentient or human status. It sounds like an enlightened idea, but our laws and societal norms cannot accommodate granting these rights without significant and fundamental change.
Take any law that governs the interaction between two humans and apply that to a human verses say a dolphin and you immediately run into serious and unworkable situations. Imagine having to grant a dolphin the right to confront their accuser in a court of law. Really? What about applying laws concerning manslaughter or murder or accidental death? What about representation in government?
Yes, I know the New York case was not about all of these things, but once the door is open you can never close it. Just look at the legal ruling that corporations are legal persons to understand what I mean.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
The want chimpanzees released from "illegal detention," but if we treated them like people, they would end up in prison very quickly. I would give them two days before they were guilty of trespass, theft, assault, and battery. They would be ruled incompetent to stand trial, and probably placed in a psychiatric prison in solitary confinement. That is what we do with people who act like chimpanzees.
From my understanding, the lawyers were hoping to create a legal fiction such that habeas corpus would be applicable to the chimpanzees, similar to the way that personhood is granted to corporations for many different purposes. A corporation needs to be a "person" so it can be sued. But corporate personhood does not grant corporations every right that people have. The same thing is happening here. No one wants to give chimpanzees the right to vote.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_fiction#Corporate_personhood
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus
Chimps are not bonobos.
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Stupid mon-
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Actually, the pedophilia would work. If chimps are deemed persons, then in the US, they would be required to abide by the laws of this country. In the US, the age of consent would still apply and since laws regarding pedophilia are age based, even if chimps are sexually mature, they would still be guilty of it. If you enact legislation permitting it for chimps, then you open up equal protection suits for human pedophiles as the two classes of person would be treated different under the law.
More likely what would happen if chimps were granted personhood would be that they are deemed incapable of caring for themselves in society and have to be institutionalized, just as they are now. I'm sure the group pushing for this would want them to be returned to the wild, however, as persons, here, but not there, they have no citizenship abroad for us to deport them. In addition, any of them born here, as persons, would be US citizens and could not be deported.
In the end, the court did the right thing. Animals, no matter how intelligent are not persons under the constitution. The appellate process will find the same thing.
Well, they don't always see eye to eye.
rewriting history since 2109
1 US Corporations
2 Foreign Corporations
3 People in my country
4 People in other countries
5 People in other countries who look like they have nothing
6 Cute animals
7 Monkeys that aren't so cute
8 People in countries the US government doesn't like
9 non-cute things that can't harm me
10 scary things
FTFY
Time to offend someone
How about these nitwits find some better ways to improve the human condition before they go off to tilt at windmills. I am all for the prevention of cruelty to animals, but this has just gone over the top into nutcake land. I don't want anything to do with PETA anymore because of the looney positions they started taking in the past few years.
The whole lot of them, just look silly and make it a lot harder for reasonable actions to be taken.
Chimps tend to mature faster than humans. So at that age, the chimp have completely undergone puberty and are more or less adult.
You really think the law regarding age of sexual consent has anything to do with biological maturity?!
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very true. in fact, there was a great nova special a few years ago (pbs tv) that contrasted the huge diff between bonobos and chimps. day and night diff. peace vs war.
I think I want to be a bonobo when I grow up ;)
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In the end, the court did the right thing. Animals, no matter how intelligent are not persons under the constitution.
Why is it then that intelligent animals don't deserve personhood, but corporations do? A sentient intelligent creature is not a person, but a legal entity is? That's pretty inconsistent.
That's a rhetorical question, by the way. The answer is obvious: money and corruption.
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No but the other way around is still true.
Even if all chimps are not bonobos (there are also troglodytes), all bonobos are chimps (as much as all troglodytes are also chimps).
So if all chimps (including bonobos, including troglodytes) had got personhood status,
then bonobo's sex life would still relevant to the joke,
even if troglodytes wouldn't be concerned by this joke.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Ah, but like most rhetorical questions the answer is easy.
To put it in simple terms...
Just because some people decide to deal together as a group does not magically take away their rights so some rights of the individuals are exercisable by the corporation. Just because a chimp can recognize an apple does not mean that it can understand and enter into our social contract.
I would suggest this article if you are interested in the concept of the social contract: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract
Presuming the US here is a article on Locke: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke
And just to be complete here is one about how the social contract is wrong (which I would disagree with): http://www.animalethics.org.uk/contractarianism.html
I would suggest this article if you actually care what "personhood" they are talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood
"Generally speaking, corporations may invoke rights that groups of individual may invoke, such as the right to petition, to speech, to enter into contracts and to hold property, to sue and to be sued. However, they may not exercise rights which are exclusive to individuals and cannot be exercised by other associations of individuals, including the right to vote and the right against self incrimination." - above link
Your "rhetorical" answer to your question only reveals that you do not understand the law.
First we must remember that the rubric "corporation", includes not only Microsoft and Wal-Mart, but also universities, hospitals, churches, municipalities, and clubs. The first corporation to assert constitutional rights in the US Supreme Court was not a business. It was Dartmouth College. ("It is a small college, but there are those that love it." - Daniel Webster).
Corporations are associations of natural persons (i.e. individual human beings), who themselves have full legal capacity and who themselves bear "rights". The associates include the directors and officers of the corporation.
Granting them corporate personhood allows them to own property and enter into contracts in their roles in the association. The Latin word for a role is "persona".
Doing this allows the property and contracts to inhere in the association so that if an individual dies or retires from his role, the property and contracts automatically transfer to the next individual who holds that role. If we did not do this, the property and contracts of the association would have to go through probate if one of the associates were to die, or be deeded for every resignation, or even worse, be subject to litigation.
The underlying social logic of this type of legal structure has been laid out by Nobel Prize winning economist Douglass North. In his view the open availability of institutional structures like the corporation is one of the hallmarks of advanced societies like the US. The lack of these structures defines base state societies like Afghanistan, Syria, and Sudan. See "Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History" by North, Wallis, & Weingast.
IAAL. As Chief Justice Coke explained to King James I, (see "Prohibitions del Roy"), issues concerning the life, liberty, and property of citizens, are not decided by the King's natural reason, but by the artificial reason and judgment of Law, which is mastered only by long study and labor. But, the Law is the golden measure that protects everyone, governor and governed alike, in safety and peace.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
but they can still take the bar exam, right?
Yes, and if they pass they can work on pro bonobo cases.
In the end, the court did the right thing. Animals, no matter how intelligent are not persons under the constitution.
Why is it then that intelligent animals don't deserve personhood, but corporations do? A sentient intelligent creature is not a person, but a legal entity is? That's pretty inconsistent.
That's a rhetorical question, by the way. The answer is obvious: money and corruption.
Corporations are juridic persons - deemed by law as opposed to natural persons. A juridic person has no rights except what the law grants them, which in the case of corporations was the exercise of free speech as related to political speech. The reason given was because the outcome of political endeavors impacts the corporation so the corporation should be free to present its support or opposition.
What was being proposed, on the other hand was not to declare chimpanzees as a type of juridic person but as a full person, the same as a human being with all of the rights afforded a person. Unlike a juridic person where rights are granted by the state, a natural person has rights by nature (or endowed by their creator). Leaving out the religious debate, the purpose of the state with regards to the rights of a natural person is not to grant them but to protect them. (The state can't grant them because the person has them by nature).
Yours might have been a rhetorical question, but it is the underpinnings of many comments on this article.