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Human rights

Animal Law

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Litigating Nonhuman Animal Legal Personhood, Richard L. Cupp Jr. Dec 2017

Litigating Nonhuman Animal Legal Personhood, Richard L. Cupp Jr.

Richard L. Cupp Jr.

In 2017 a New York appellate court issued a landmark ruling rejecting an animal rights organization’s efforts to assign legal personhood status to chimpanzees in Matter of Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Lavery. This paper provides context for the ruling, and includes an amicus curiae brief the author filed in the case. The court discussed the amicus curiae brief in explaining its ruling, and a prominent animal law blog described the court’s decision as “citing to and relying on” the brief. The brief asserts and the court ruled that rights are broadly connected to humans’ norm of capacity for legal …


The Primary Right, Carter Dillard Jan 2012

The Primary Right, Carter Dillard

Carter Dillard

As climate change materializes, legal theorists face the urgent need to develop a normative baseline for environmental regulation. Meanwhile, in the seemingly unrelated field of political exit theory, theorists have presumed that while one ought to be able to exit any polity one cannot exit all polities. This essay challenges that presumption, and simultaneously addresses the baseline problem in environmental law, by combining the analyses to develop a new human right derived from exit right theory called the primary right: a general claim-right of reasonable access to wilderness. The derivation is simple: If consent is necessary to justify political association, …