“Happy is an autonomous and sentient Asian elephant who evolved to lead a physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially complex life,” Professor Tribe writes. “Every day for forty years, her imprisonment by the Bronx Zoo has deprived her of this life.”
Happy... Bronx Zoo captive
World-renowned legal scholar and Harvard Law School Professor Laurence H.
Tribe has requested leave to file an amicus brief in support of a habeas
corpus petition filed by the Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP) on behalf of an
elephant held alone in captivity in the Bronx Zoo.
“Happy is an autonomous and sentient Asian elephant who evolved to lead a
physically, intellectually, emotionally, and socially complex life,”
Professor Tribe writes. “Every day for forty years, her imprisonment by the
Bronx Zoo has deprived her of this life.”
Professor Tribe’s brief addresses the NhRP’s recent appeal in Happy’s case,
which seeks her release to an elephant sanctuary and her legal
transformation from a “thing” with no rights to a “person” with the
fundamental right to liberty protected by the common law writ of habeas
corpus.
In his brief, Professor Tribe urges the New York Supreme Court, Appellate
Division, First Judicial Department to reject the “arbitrary” and
“unsustainable” appellate decisions issued in the NhRP’s chimpanzee rights
cases. Earlier this year, Bronx Supreme Court Justice Alison Y. Tuitt wrote
that while she “agrees [with the NhRP] that Happy is more than just a legal
thing, or property … and may be entitled to liberty,” she was required to
dismiss Happy’s habeas petition because “regrettably … this Court is bound
by the legal precedent set by the Appellate Division when it held that
animals are not ‘persons’ entitled to rights and protections afforded by the
writ of habeas corpus.”
The appellate decisions in those cases, Professor Tribe argues, “rest on the
manifestly unjust and myopic premise that human beings are the only species
entitled to legal personhood and therefore the only beings on earth capable
of possessing legal rights. These decisions run counter to New York’s common
law of habeas corpus, which has a noble tradition of expanding the ranks of
rights holders.”
As lauded by Professor Tribe in his brief, “the trial courts of New York
have now twice taken the monumental first step of granting a habeas corpus
hearing to a nonhuman animal” in the NhRP’s chimpanzee and elephant rights
litigation. In considering the NhRP’s arguments on appeal in Happy’s case,
the First Department now has the “unique opportunity” to correct its own
errors of law and those of the Third Department and recognize Happy’s
personhood and right to liberty. If it fails to do so and repeats these
errors, “the evolution of common law writs like habeas corpus will remain
chained to the prejudices and presumptions of the past and will lose their
vital and rightly celebrated capacity to nudge societies toward more
embracing visions of justice.”
Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and Professor of Constitutional Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School. Action on the brief is expected in the next four to six weeks.
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