An organization called the Nonhuman Rights Project (NHRP) filed several lawsuits in New York state courts last month asserting habeas corpus claims on behalf of several chimpanzees. The lawsuits basically asked the courts to grant limited human rights to four chimpanzees living in human captivity in the state. This is believed to be the first time a lawsuit has sought habeas protection for nonhumans.

According to the NHRP, one of the chimps, Tommy, is living in a cage on a used trailer lot. The owner of the trailer lot, Patrick Lavery, takes issue with that description, telling the Daily Beast that he has tried but has been unable to find a sanctuary for Tommy, and adding,

I’m not just some Joe Blow who’s got a chimp locked up in the garage. Of course, I think they should live in the wild, but the sad fact is that not all of them do and that’s where people like me come in, spending $100,000 of my own money to help out and buying monkey chow by the ton.

Another chimp, Kiko, is deaf and lives in a private home in Niagara Falls, according to the NHRP. The other two chimps, Hercules and Leo, are at a research center at Long Island’s Stony Brook University.

Through New York’s online court system, I identified three lawsuits filed in December 2013:

• Nonhuman Rights Project on behalf of Tommy v. Lavery, Index No. 002051/2013, Supreme Court of Fulton County, New York. Filed 12/02/2013, disposed 12/17/2013
• Nonhuman Rights Project on behalf of Kiko v. Presti, Index No. 151725/2013, Supreme Court of Niagara County, New York, Filed 12/03/2013, disposed 12/10/2013
• Nonhuman Rights Project on behalf of Hercules and Leo v. Stanley, Index No. 032098/2013, Supreme Court of Suffolk County, New York, Filed 12/05/2013, currently open

A judge dismissed Tommy’s case after an hour-long hearing on December 3, expressing sympathy for the cause but declining to extend legal personhood to a chimpanzee. In Kiko’s case, a judge denied the request for a order to show cause after a hearing by telephone on December 9, saying that the question of chimpanzee personhood is better resolved by the legislature than the courts. A Suffolk County judge denied the petition for Hercules and Leo without holding a hearing. The NHRP has announced that it will be appealing all three cases.

The NHRP is taking an interesting approach. Habeas corpus is a common law doctrine going back to merry olde England, meaning it predates the U.S. Constitution. It directly pertains to people who have been incarcerated after conviction for a crime. A prisoner petitions for habeas corpus in order to compel the prison warden to provide a justification for the person’s continued incarceration. (I’m sure common-law scholars are aghast at my oversimplification, but I’m not writing a law review article here, okay?)

The NHRP’s lawsuits are asking the human custodians of the chimpanzees to justify keeping the chimps captive. This requires at least two questionable premises: (1) that the chimpanzees have legal standing to challenge their confinement (the issue on which the judges appear to have based their dismissals), and (2) that the NHRP may act on behalf of the chimpanzees to assert these rights.

That second premise is intriguing to me, because this sort of case is different from others where someone might act on behalf of another. A parent or guardian may bring a lawsuit on behalf of a child in their care, provided that there is a legally-recognized relationship in place. The same is true for someone with guardianship rights over an adult, or someone acting under a power of attorney.

All of these relationships are based, in part, on the idea that one individual cannot make their own legal decisions, but either used to have that capacity or will one day have that capacity. Neither applies to a chimpanzee, which will (presumably) never reach a point of being able to make informed decisions about its own welfare within human legal systems. I’m not saying that this means a chimpanzee, or other similarly intelligent animal, should not have some legally-recognized rights, but rather that we haven’t worked out all the snags yet.

I find the NHRP’s habeas corpus theory more convincing than PETA’s constitutional argument in its unsuccessful lawsuit against SeaWorld. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of the infamous orca Tilikum, asserted that keeping orcas in captivity violated the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery and “involuntary servitude.”

A federal judge in San Diego held that PETA lacked standing to bring a lawsuit on Tilikum’s behalf under the Thirteenth Amendment, but noted that other statutes might confer standing for specific criminal acts against an animal. The Ninth Circuit previously held in Cetacean Community v. Bush that whales do not have independent standing to sue the government under the Endangered Species Act and other statutes.

Tommy and his fellow chimps will be headed to the appellate court. Unless a legislative body in the U.S. does something to recognize the rights of apes, whales, and other intelligent animals, though, I would not hold my breath for very many courtroom victories on this issue. I’m still highly uncertain as to where I stand on the issue, anyway.

Photo credits: Ikiwaner (Own work) [GFDL 1.2], via Wikimedia Commons; Aaron Logan [CC-BY-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons; Thomas Lersch [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons; Robert Pittman [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.