Thank you Steven Wise, I see you include only Chimps for now since our fellow human apes are too busy thinking about themselves. We all know every species on this planet have feelings and thoughts albeit it cannot be anthropomorphize.
So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall that separates legal things from legal persons. On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. They don't count in law. They don't have any legal rights. They don't have the capacity for legal rights. They are the slaves. On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. Legal persons are very visible to judges. They count in law. They may have many rights. They have the capacity for an infinite number of rights. And they're the masters. Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things. All human beings are legal persons.
But being human and being a legal person has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person. Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. On the one side, there have been many human beings over the centuries who have been legal things. Slaves were legal things. Women, children, were sometimes legal things. Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons.
But alas, that hole has closed up. Now, on the other side are legal persons, but they've never only been limited to human beings. There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive. In the United States, we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons. In pre-independence India, a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person, that a mosque was a legal person. In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person, and in 2012, just recently, there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person who owned its own riverbed.
So for centuries, there's been a great legal wall that separates legal things from legal persons. On one hand, legal things are invisible to judges. They don't count in law. They don't have any legal rights. They don't have the capacity for legal rights. They are the slaves. On the other side of that legal wall are the legal persons. Legal persons are very visible to judges. They count in law. They may have many rights. They have the capacity for an infinite number of rights. And they're the masters. Right now, all nonhuman animals are legal things. All human beings are legal persons.
But being human and being a legal person has never been, and is not today, synonymous with a legal person. Humans and legal persons are not synonymous. On the one side, there have been many human beings over the centuries who have been legal things. Slaves were legal things. Women, children, were sometimes legal things. Indeed, a great deal of civil rights struggle over the last centuries has been to punch a hole through that wall and begin to feed these human things through the wall and have them become legal persons.
But alas, that hole has closed up. Now, on the other side are legal persons, but they've never only been limited to human beings. There are, for example, there are many legal persons who are not even alive. In the United States, we're aware of the fact that corporations are legal persons. In pre-independence India, a court held that a Hindu idol was a legal person, that a mosque was a legal person. In 2000, the Indian Supreme Court held that the holy books of the Sikh religion was a legal person, and in 2012, just recently, there was a treaty between the indigenous peoples of New Zealand and the crown, in which it was agreed that a river was a legal person who owned its own riverbed.
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