 Hello and welcome everyone to our fourth event in the Topping Animals Law and Philosophy series here at the University of Cambridge. My name is Raphael Fazel, I'm the convener of the talk series. We are very honoured to have Stephen Wise tonight or today as our guest. Steve is currently touring Europe to talk about the non-human rights project and we are very grateful that he found the time for a stop here in Cambridge, sunny today as it turns out. As many of you will already know, Steve is the founder and president of the Non-Human Rights Project, headquartered in sunny Coral Springs, Florida, and the aim of the Non-Human Rights Project, which is a not-for-profit organisation, is to secure legally recognised fundamental rights for non-human animals. Steve graduated with the Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from William & Mary College and a JD from Boston University Law School. He has practiced animal protection law for over 30 years throughout the United States and has taught animal rights law at numerous universities including Harvard, Stanford, Vermont, and Lewis and Clark Law School. He has authored many articles and books and one of these most recent books called Though the Heavens May Fall might soon be turned into a film or mini series starring an actor from Game of Thrones. Steve got the attention not only of Game of Thrones stars but the world more generally with his pioneering work on the leading person work of non-human animals. The Non-Human Rights Project has been making international headlines since Steve and his team filed the first ever Rick of Hager's Corpus petition on behalf of the non-human animal, the chimp Tommy, in a New York State court in 2013. The lawsuits that the Non-Human Rights Project has since filed on behalf of other chimpanzees and most recently also elephants have been featured in news outlets such as the New York Times, CNN, BBC, The Guardian and now also an HBO documentary we call Unlocking the Cage. Today Steve will tell us more about the work of the Non-Human Rights Project in his presentation with the title The Struggle of the Non-Human Rights Project for the Legal Personhood of Non-Human Animals. Please join me all in welcoming Steve. I thought I would come here and speak before I begin my tour of Europe. Anyway, so, you know, my wife always tells me, never tell a joke in another country. Frankly, this is the first time that even a single person has ever laughed. So I really appreciate that. Thank you very much. I can't wait to tell her that someone laughed. That joke I made in another country. So, the Non-Human Rights Project is an organization, it is a civil rights organization that focuses on obtaining legal rights for at least some non-human animals. So we don't call ourselves an animal rights organization, animal protection organization. We call ourselves civil rights organization and the lawyers within are civil rights lawyers. And it's just that our clients aren't human being, but we don't think they have to be. And in 1985, when my hair was the color just better than everyone else's here, I had been working in animal protection for five years as a lawyer. And I realized that there was a systemic or structural problem in the case of your client, which is that the non-human animals were legal things. And that was a real problem. And I began to try to figure out how we're going to deal with that. That's the issue of the same versus personal. But in 1985, there wouldn't have been you. I wouldn't be here speaking to you. There weren't any classes. There were very few talks about it. There weren't any academic courses, no law school courses, no larger articles, no books. There was certainly nothing at all. So I realized that I'd have to, with my colleagues, to really start from scratch and try to figure out how we were going to get to the point where we would be able to begin using the legal system, filing lawsuits, especially, that could reasonably lead to non-human animals becoming legal persons instead of legal families. And at that time in 1985, I estimated that it would be 30 years before we could file a first lawsuit. And it turned out that I was wildly pessimistic. It was actually 28 years. So as Rafael said, it happened in 2013. So what we had to do during that time was to begin getting an aura of respectability to the whole idea that a non-human animal could have a legal right. We had to begin teaching this in law schools. We had to begin writing law review articles, eventually writing books, forming organizations, and then, of course, coming up with legal theories that had a reasonable chance of being able to win. And then, and this is one of the most important parts, is we had to wait for the world to get ready for us, because whatever kind of theories that we were going to use in 1985 would have gone nowhere at all. By 2013, we thought that that was the first time in which we could get some kind of traction with our legal theories. And I think we did, and we continued to do so. So in 2013, then, the Non-Human Rights Project, actually in the first week of December 2013, filed a series of three common law hate-disc workers cases. And they were on behalf of Fortune Vansies in the state of New York. And so I wanted to spend most of my time talking about how those came to be and then what the Non-Human Rights Project is now doing and is going through. So one of the most important things that we had to figure out was what sort of a cause of action should be used? Because there are all kinds of problems, as you might imagine, on a final lawsuit on behalf of the same. And so since Roman times, the world has essentially been divided between things on one side of this legal wall, that I call it, and persons on the other side. And where you are is determinative of what's going to happen to you. So if you're a thing, you lack the capacity for any kind of legal right. You're essentially invisible to civil law, a small city civil law, actually proud of the law, who I'd see, too. You don't count at all in jurisprudence. You're not seen as having inherent value, but only instrumental value for legal persons. So on the other hand, the legal persons are seen as having inherent value, a great deal of inherent value where all the legal persons are here. We all count in the legal system in some kind of a fundamental way and we have the capacity for one or ten or an infinite number of legal rights. Now, I think I have one thing here, my mother. Sometimes I try to demonstrate what a legal person is, because one problem I often times have is that judges on the front don't understand what a legal person is. And one of the problems that the non-human rights problem inevitably has is that many judges believe that legal person and human being are synonyms. And so the first thing we have to do is try to explain to them that a legal person and human being are not synonyms. A synonym, a legal person is a... I have one more shot at it. A human being is a legal person. But many human beings have not been legal persons. So on the thing side, at one point, slaves were not persons. Women might not have been persons, children might not have been persons since Roman times. And a lot of the civil rights activity over the last centuries have been involved with moving human beings who are legal things and moving them through this wall, kind of a semi-permeable wall, over to the side of being a legal person. And that has now all been done. But it is a process. And sometimes judges don't understand that it is a process. And so the process we argue continues. And also we try to point out to judges on the other hand that there have always been entities who are not human beings who are legal persons, who have the capacity for rights. And so corporations are a famous example. Or ships. Or probably the University of Cambridge likely is a person. Or the UK is probably for at least some purposes a person. But there are more to the point for us. In New Zealand, some of our sister common law countries over the last couple years, the Waini Nui River has been declared to be a person. Which means it has whatever rights and responsibilities or rights or duties that a person has in New Zealand. A national park has been made a person. In England, I'm sorry, in India, in the 1925, a Hindu idol was a person. And mosques has been made to be a person. In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court held that the holy books of the Sikh religion is a person. And they mean it literally that they are persons. They have a capacity for rights. So before I could put this down. So sometimes how I can explain in a way that perhaps even judges can understand what a person is. So I said, look, oftentimes I try to have an empty container here. So just be my hand. So I have an empty container here. So without anything at all. If I pretend that every droplet in this bottle is a legal right. So I could just kind of spill on the floor. Nobody has those legal rights. You have to have legal rights contained. But something has to hold the legal rights. And the legal term for that is person. A person is a legal rights container. And so what the non-human rights project tries to do is to have the judges create or register and recognize that all these acts exist. That there are at least certain non-human animals who are persons who ought to be legal rights containers. So they have at least the capacity for that. And when we frown suit, we ask that they be given a specific right which is the right to bottle liberty because we use the right to have this purpose which I'll talk about. But then once it's understood that an entity is a person, they have the capacity for any kind of legal right, then you can begin litigating or going into parliaments and begin dropping one right at a time saying shouldn't this person have this right? Or this right? Or this right? But first, you have to make sure that we're dealing with a legal container so our clients have to be persons. Now, you don't necessarily have to say they're persons. If a judge or a legislature gives an entity a legal right, well then they're automatically persons because remember a legal rights, the capacity of a legal person is sorry, I'm a little gentle, right? So a legal person, remember, is an entity with the capacity for a right. So if they have a right, it obviously means that they have the capacity for a right as well. So what right are we looking for? What cause of action is people would say? Did we decide that we wanted to bring? Well, Raphael spoke about a book I wrote that's called Doe of the Heavens May Fall which tells the story of the 1772 case in London of Somerset vs. Steward where essentially Lord Mansfield ended human slavery in England in that on June 22nd 1772, in that case. And he said that slavery was so odious. And I like it when I'm trying to put English-speaking audience because it's really hard to convey how awful odious is if people are not native English speakers. There's not many things that are worse than odious. So he said that slavery, something like human slavery, James Somerset was so odious that the common law would not support it. Now that case was brought as a writ of hideous worthiness. And that's one of the reasons I wrote the book. Not only that, but the second was brought as a common law writ of hideous purpose. So a writ of hideous purpose or hideous purpose is Latin for you have the body and it developed in England beginning in the 13th or 14th centuries and by the time of the Somerset case in 1771 it had begun, it had really taken on the form that we understand today which essentially somebody is detaining somebody else without their consent. And that somebody could be the British government or that somebody could be my next door neighbor. You could have private detention, you could have a public detention. And when that happens, because someone's bodily liberty is at stake and the courts, these common law courts, but I think civil law courts as well, have so valued bodily liberty that they used the writ of hideous purpose as a way of quickly determining whether or not the detainee was being held against her will or not. And if she was, then they stayed ordered or freed. And this is what happened relatively quickly. It's supposed to be kind of freeform, it's supposed to be a summary writ. It's supposed to happen fast and if someone is being detained and they're supposed to be like that. So that's what happened in the Somerset case where James Somerset was a slave brought from Boston and he was held in London and in October of 1771 he escaped and his angry master Charles Stewart then hired slave catchers in London to find him and I think it took 73 days to find him. They found him, they put him on a ship and they were going to send him to Jamaica where he would then be sold in the slave markets and lived the three to five years in a slave or harborset. Sugarcane and Jamaica lived. Before they could do that, someone probably his godparents but in its infinite wisdom the folks in charge of the judicial records in England 105 years ago decided that they were going to cut it like clean house, one of the things they cleaned was they threw out the original petition for habeas corpus on behalf of James Somerset. So we'll never know for sure but it was likely his godparents who did that and the reason that Black slaves got godparents in the 18th century was because they were under the delusion that one Christian would not imprison another Christian would not enslave another Christian no matter how many times they saw that that was not true but they still became Christians and godparents. But what they began, what they really used before was to help them escape that function of a godparent in London in the 18th century. So it worked. He indeed was free. Sudbury indeed was essentially over at least in the mainland England, not in the colonies, that was going to have to take works of Parliament but through Lord Mansfield he was over in England at least. So I looked at that and thought we're going to use our first calls of action to rid of habeas corpus. It's fast. Another thing it does is that it doesn't burden us with the problem of standing and in the United States and in a lot of countries there's something called standing which means that the person and again the only one who has the power to file a lawsuit would be a person because you have to write the file lawsuits you have to be the person and that could be one of your rights. So the person who files a lawsuit also has to be the one who's injured. So if you and I enter into a contract and you breach it, then if I don't want to sue you someone else cannot sue you because they'll be thrown out of court because they lack standing, they haven't been injured. One of the paradoxes that exists which is one of the reasons the non-human rights budget exists is that in order to be able to file a successful lawsuit you have to be done by a person who is injured. The problem is if you're still on behalf of a non-human animal she's been injured but she's not a person. As a human being sued, like I like how I'm suing, I'm a person but I haven't been injured. So the injured person isn't a person. The person who isn't a person is being injured. So that stops lawsuits on behalf of the fundamental interest of non-human animals dead. Just like it does for people trying to sue on behalf of the environmental objects or the environment, if you have that sort of standing as you do in the US. So standing is a problem that was taken care of usually in taking this purpose case is because of the fact that judges realized that when someone is being detained against their will the detainer didn't let the detained person go in order to go file a lawsuit. So some third party would have to then file a lawsuit on behalf of the detained person so they wouldn't have to be injured. And so we wanted that. We wanted to get rid of the standing problem. So that was another reason we sought to mitigate these purposes. Another reason is that, as I said, they're really fast. So if we're going to win, especially if we're going to lose, and we're fully expected to lose because we understood that when everything goes on for 2,000 years of the law, you're not about to waltz in on the first case, or the fifth case, or maybe not even on the tenth case or the twentieth case, and also the judge is going to say, holy slow, after 2,000 years we've been screwing up the whole time we win. We're really sorry. That's just joining not how judges work. So we figured that we were going to be in a long fight. And so we didn't want to have the case each case take a long time to lose. We're going to lose. We want to lose fast. And we did lose fast, which is something that was okay with us. So in New York, for example, when you are seeking a rid-of-hate-guess corpus, you go into court, you go into X-tarquet, which means without the other side being there, and ask that the judge issue a rid-of-hate-guess corpus. And as I'll talk about it, or I may not, but what happens is that the judge would go in, judge, would you issue a rid-of-hate-guess corpus on behalf of the chimpanzees. The judge would say, no. He'd say, thank you. That was it. We lost. We lost in 10 minutes. But then we could appeal. So at least we didn't have to wait, you know, for five years to lose, we could lose in 10 minutes. And in fact, what we wanted to do was get up to the appeal-hate-guess courts anyway. So we would seek a rid-of-hate-guess corpus. And also we would seek it under the common law. So, and this is one of the few audiences I have around the world, but I don't have to explain what the common law is. You might have had some idea. So the common law essentially is a law that judges make while they're in the process of deciding cases. English-speaking judges make in the process of deciding cases. When I speak to people who are not from the common law world, the idea that judges make law is something that's usually foreign to them. So I say, yes, a common law judge can actually make law in the interstices of legislation, and they do. American judges are a little bit a lot more loose about that. They make a lot more law, but English judges do it as well. So what we wanted to do then was go in on a rid-of-hate-guess corpus, but not just angry, not statutory rid-of-hate-guess corpus or constitutional rid-of-hate-guess corpus or international rid-of-hate-guess corpus, but a common rid-of-hate-guess corpus so that we could argue to the judge that, look, judge, you judges, it wasn't you, it was your forefathers, your mothers, but it was usually your fathers, were the ones who designated all non-human animals with legal things a long, long time ago, and that the common law is supposed to evolve in light of changing scientific discovery, in light of changing morals, in ethics, in changing human experience, it's supposed to evolve. And so we want to be prepared then or we're prepared to show you that morality has evolved, human experience has changed, there's been a massive amount of scientific evidence that shows that our non-human animal plaintiff is not what a judge would have thought they were 500 years ago or even 100 years ago. Maybe even 50 years ago. And so we want you, who made this proclamation, this legal statement that all non-human animals are things, we want you not to omit it in light of the changes that we're going to put in front of you, because we're concerned that if we fassude and claim that an elephant is a person with a certain statute that uses the word person, what's likely to happen is that the court is going to say they're going to look at the legislative history of that statute, and they're going to conclude that when the legislature used the word person, they weren't thinking about elephants. They were thinking about some kind of human being. So the same thing about the written constitution that we have. And so we didn't want a judge to be interpreting the word person that somebody else had written. We wanted them to use the common law definition of a person, and which was supposed to be, in theory, much more flexible. So that's why we use, just not only I hate to say a writ of hate is purpose, but we use the common law to writ of hate is purpose. And why do we choose chimpanzees? Well, we chose chimpanzees, and since then we've found the law sort of behind the elephants. We've probably found other law sort of behind the elephants of chimpanzees. We're looking at the Orcas being held captive at SeaWorld in San Diego, but why do we choose those sorts of non-human animals? It's generally the same reason. One, all of those animals are not indigenous to the United States. So there's relatively few of them, which means there are not gigantic economic interests in them. And so we do not have gigantic economic interests allied against us, at least at the beginning of our work. So there's few of them. They have little low economic interests. They're also been the subject of a lot of cognition research, and the research has shown that they're extraordinarily cognitively complex. And so we want to make arguments around their extraordinary cognitive complexity. Now, this raises the issue as to why do we care about their cognitive complexity? Well, when we're deciding where we want to file a suit because we filed that lawsuit in the state of New York, we chose the state of New York after looking at the law of all 50 states of the U.K., of South Africa, India, probably 20 English-speaking countries with a common law heritage, and we ended up liking the state of New York the best. But what are we looking for? Why do we care? The reason why we care is that we suspected, and I'm sure we suspected correctly, that most judges would think that what we're doing was really weird and that they were not going to listen to us as carefully as we might want. By the way, and they don't listen to us as carefully as we might want. Many judges that we go in front of clearly have no idea what we're talking about. And frankly, they have less idea than we had hoped when we began to begin litigating, but that we see that, and if you see the film on Lock in a Cave, it plays on BBC Four now and then, I know. You'll see one judge maybe not coincidentally, the only female trial judge we've ever drawn who understands what we're doing. A lot of the male trial judges we draw are Kuhlis and arrogant. They're arrogant with Kuhlis. They're arrogant with Kuhlis. So we're hoping that changes as you keep bringing these cases and things along. But you'll see Justice Jacqueline, she grasps what we're doing. She grasps what we're doing. She's only on film. You've got to be on film for a few minutes but you can get the idea. Although it's not just like a man, men and women divide. You'll also be able to see a female college judge who clearly wants to leap over the bench and slap me. So it's not just men and women but at least at the trial level the only female judge we ever had was the one that we thought was the furthest with. So when we looked at each jurisdiction the reason we were doing that is we wanted to try to understand what were the values and principles that the judges in that jurisdiction claimed to hold. What do they think is important as judges as demonstrated in their judicial decisions? And we would see the same things again and again. The ideas of quality, of liberty, of autonomy, and that kind of thing. That would be kind of part of liberty but also part of autonomy. And so we then, after understanding liberty, quality, and autonomy were three very important common law values that we then frame our litigation in terms of those values. So we go into court and we argue that as a matter of common law liberty our nonhuman animal climate chimpanzee or elephant to work out ought to have the fundamental right to bodily liberty the common law right to bodily liberty that's protected by a common law and what we saw for example with respect to autonomy was that you take the state of New York that there were cases that were now 30, 40 years old in which and I know it's true in the UK because I know I've already a couple cases about it where you have someone who's in the hospital and he or she is dying and the only thing that will save her the only thing that will save her is if there's some kind of surgery which she doesn't want or some kind of medication which she doesn't want and she said I'd rather die than have this surgery to take this medication and then the hospital then goes to the courts and say essentially we want you to override her autonomy and permit us to medicate her or bring her into surgery against her will in order to save her life and the courts uniformly would say we're not going to do that with our respect for her autonomy trumps the state's interest in her life so you can't do it if she wants to die then she can die and so from that we concluded that autonomy if it's not the supreme common law value it's certainly one of them because they say we care more about her autonomy than we care about her life it's her choice that's the most important thing and so when we were looking at non-human animal clients we would go to the experts in that field the people who study chimpanzees or study elephants for their whole lives 10 years, 20, 30, 40, 50 years Jane Goodall's on my board of directors so we actually we also thought about chimpanzees too and so we would go to them and learn everything that we could about what they did and I had been thinking about this for many years so in my first book in 2000 Rounding the Cage that focused on chimpanzees and bobbins and my second book in 2003 added African great-parents and elephants and whales but I had been thinking about chimpanzees a lot and there was a huge amount of research on them and then I would then go visit their laboratory or I'd go into Uganda you know, up into the Kevala Mountains and see chimpanzees in the wild and see whether or not there was enough scientific evidence that we could argue correctly that chimpanzees were autonomous beings and we believe that there were so in the first book when we filed suit we then put 100 pages of affidavits from the eight or nine top chimpanzee of cognition experts in the world showing that chimpanzees are autonomous beings so the reason we then do this which is that we don't come into our own ideas what we do is try to understand what the values and principles of the judges are in that jurisdiction and then we make the arguments from their values and principles is that we're hoping that one of three things happens it turns out actually four things happen that we didn't expect in the last one one of them is they say those aren't our values and principles you lose we'd say okay now he knows we're going to file another lawsuit this time invoking correctly your values and principles the second one is they say you are invoking our values and principles we agree with you, you won you win we'd like to give them that option the third one and this is the one that's most common these are our values and principles and you lose anyway and why? because we say so and that's really been a serious problem for us but we think it's a much more serious problem for the judges because an arbitrary or irrational decision is unstable and it's not going to stand and we've been subject to several irrational irrational and or arbitrary decisions but they just simply say sorry the last case we had involving consultants the judge which is on a piano now the judge said oh they aren't going to make they all come from cases involving humans therefore you lose and so when we found a motion for a review and we said well you know there's thousands and thousands of common law rules guess what every single one of them was new at one time and somebody came in for the first time and argued something new and that's what we're doing so if we're going to cite cases we can't cite cases where not human animals have gotten rights before because no one's ever asked for that to happen there's no such case so what we're doing is we're citing cases in which black slaves saw it right to the first time or we saw it like we have a case in Supreme Court of California where a Chinese person was not allowed to testify in the court why? as the California Supreme Court so well explained because they were stupid because they had no history and because everybody knew that they were out they were bare-faced liars that's why they can't Native Americans in the United States saw hateist corporate rights and the United States government said Native Americans they're not persons they can't be a thief and the government puts them in jail they can't get out of jail because they're not persons just like black slaves were citing cases where women tried to become lawyers in the United States in the state of Wisconsin 1876 and the court said are you kidding me women are just look at them nature has equipped them not for being lawyers but for all kinds of other things and also law is so disgusting the practice of law is so disgusting having primarily to do with things involving sex that we could even talk about in neural argument because she was sitting in the courtroom and other ways women were just too too delicate to ever become lawyers and we try to show that that can't we just skip the part where you try to get away from not deciding cases based upon your own values and principles and instead of having to say things that are irrational or arbitrary now and we have to wait 50 or 100 years so we can look back and see how stupid your rulings were can we just skip that phase and go right to the phase of oh we're going to apply our own values to principles it may not surprise you I actually do not say that I'm just overtly in a courtroom but I have been saying more and more in our public statements and in our interviews to the press in terms of it may be a time that judges start thinking about their place in history because believe it or not after you're gone the case that you're going to be remembered for is going to be ours all the cases you did involving contracts and people running each other over with cars and all that stuff is going to be forgotten in comparison to the momentous question of whether millions or billions of non-human animals are going to continue to be treated the horrendous way that we are treating them that's really the social issue of our time so the fourth way that they can deal with this that we're really expecting is that they can try to obstruct our ability to appeal we've had that happen that really shocked us we weren't really expecting that so in one of the three cases we found in that first week because it was ex-partner which meant the other side wasn't even there when we lost the judge said judge said I can't be the first judge to make this loop of faith I understand that and so because there's no other side at that time the judge has to agree that what documents are going to go up to the appellate court we only file two things our petition for Hickey's purpose and our memorandum so we file things saying these are the only two documents that exist we want to send them up to the court and three months goes by so we call up his court and we say when's he going to rule and the court says he's not we say what do you mean he's not he's not, you're never going to appeal and we said okay, yes we are and so we then go to an appellate court we actually file something that lawyers call a writ of mandamus which a mandamus means that a public official is not doing her job and so judges have one job decide we said this judge isn't acting like a judge we want the appellate court to order the judge to do one thing to decide he can go to justice, he can go to forest we don't care, yes to the sun and so unfortunately for the judge that was on Friday on Sunday we were on the cover of the Sunday New York Times magazine and the next day the appellate court settled the hearing because we had sued him and miraculously the day after that we went to appeal and up we went that pale in the consideration we went in front of an appellate court which is now actually under appeal currently further we go to an appellate court in Manhattan and we when we walk in with our appeal they say you don't have the right to appeal and we say of course we have the right to appeal they say no and they say you can ask for our permission for the appeal we say that's not true so we file a motion in front of the judge of the appellate court a motion for leaves to file an appeal as a matter of right which seemed ridiculous but that's what we did and even more ridiculous the judge denied it and said we didn't have a right to appeal we said well you're wrong too and so we then asked that that would be re-heard and a five-touch panel heard it and they all agreed we didn't have a right to appeal so we said okay now we're in some kind of like you know Alice in the legal one with that here and so we decided that we would file a writ of mandate but it turned out in New York the highest court in the state of New York could not mandate we didn't have jurisdiction so we decided to file a writ of mandate and it's in the court demanding that they order themselves to do what they're correctly going down and that worked so somebody woke up and realized what was going on and that court we got a call from the clerk of the court saying that we now have the right to appeal but would we withdraw our mandate in this action they'll give us our filing feedback so it looks like they just did it spontaneously so we just wanted to appeal so we did that so if you go to the court it looks like five to nothing we lost and then all of a sudden five to nothing we win so the important thing was that we were finally able to appeal when we did that we then entered even further into Alice and we didn't want to land because obviously somebody was mad that we were in front of them and that was our decision that made no legal sentence whatsoever I think it's fair to say that every sentence of the decision was wrong and we were so irritated about that that we actually annotated every single sentence and put it up on our website to show that every single sentence of that judicial decision was wrong and you can read it we're non-human rights dog award read the first department decision showing that every single sentence of that decision was wrong so we currently have that case we've asked the high court to please do something about this the outlaw they want they can take a discretionary discretionary way and they use to take three to five percent of the cases and they are not likely to take this so they're not likely to take anything but they might and one of the reasons that they might do it is that we have been assembling or more more people have been asking this what can we do and they've been filing amicus or friendly court rates on our impact and so there are now four sets of amicus that have been filed asking the high court in New York to hear our case one of them is by Harvard Law School Professor Lawrence Tribe who's one of being both well-known and important constitutional law professors in the United States and has argued more cases from the United States Supreme Court than any other lawyer he says take the case the lower court was wrong a second one is the Center for Constitutional Rights which has done a lot of work with Amicus Court with Guantanamo and Amace and one case from the United States Supreme Court are two Hickey's Purpose Lawyers including one who works in Guantanamo but perhaps the most interesting one was a consortium of 17 philosophers got together and filed an amicus curia and in which they pointed out to the court that not only was it making we have to believe us making elementary legal errors but it was they were making elementary philosophical errors and they asked the judge to hear the case because in order to stop it we actually made it we actually got on a conference call with them 17 philosophers and we're absolutely stunned that they they were really cohesive they didn't agree with each other on anything exactly but together they were like they were there and ready to do it and they turned out to be only amazing people they got the amicus curia brief done and academics I'm only a part time academic for a long time but within a week of doing that they also had a book deal which they're doing chapters that are based on the amicus curia brief and they also have an op-ed piece in this Sunday's upcoming New York Times so they know what they're doing in more ways than one so what the Nottingham Runch Fund is now doing is we're continuing to litigate our cases involving chimpanzees in New York depending upon what the court of appeals does it's a hot court if you are we made them file a lawsuit on behalf of an elephant in the wrong zoo we began filing lawsuits in Connecticut a lawsuit on behalf of three elephants who are kept in a traveling circus something that really makes me angry to see elephants abuse I'm angrier than almost anything else I don't know why and so we have that lawsuit that was the one in which the judge said your suit is frivolous because no one's ever filed a suit before on behalf of a non-human animal and we're just taking an appeal off we're also going to actually be filing a second we're going to try to get from another judge try to get if not, we'll take them off we're also looking at California cases right now we're likely to be filing a suit on behalf of a chimpanzee elephant and or orcas who are in prison at SeaWorld so we're looking at those and we've also begun to realize that the terrible abuse and exploitation of non-human animals it's just not a problem in the United States obviously so over the last few years we've begun to reach out to groups of lawyers and kind of put out an APB for people who are interested in us to go to work with lawyers in other countries or either through their judicial system or through their parlance are trying to get legal person voters some kind of fundamental rights for non-human animals so I visit people with legal groups in Sweden, Finland and we've been working with a group in London for years now in Argentina, and by the way that was the first time that the theories that we've been working on wore through last November a chimpanzee named Cecilia who is in prison in the Mendoza Zoo was the subject of a real case the judge found that Cecilia was a non-human person issued to the APB released from the zoo and sent to a sanctuary in Brazil there's also been in Colombia a speckled bear named Chucho someone brought the lawsuit using the similar kinds of arguments lost at the first level lost at the second level lost at the third level and the drive-up is now up to the fourth level so we're working on giving a talk to the Malaysian Bar Association in Kuala Lumpur in a few weeks in Hong Kong we've repeatedly gone to India we're working with groups there to try to get elephants at least some elephants seen as persons with certain kinds of fundamental rights you know Australia, New Zealand Spain France Switzerland we were working with the folks in Switzerland but they seem to be able to do a real good job on their own so what we do is we go in and we kind of stay in the background and say if you need our help we'll give you whatever experience you have but you know we're like the foreigners and we're just there in the background you guys go ahead and do what you think needs to be done and you will be able to do your problem so in a longer nutshell than I would have wanted that's what the non-human right probably does and that's our struggle and so what I really like to do is answer questions or have a discussion so thank you