Dear John,

Good news! World-renowned legal scholar and Harvard Law School Professor Laurence H. Tribe has filed an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in support of Happy’s habeas corpus petition. An amicus curiae is a person or entity who seeks to provide a court with expertise or insight on the legal issues raised by a case. 

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 (which we expect will hear arguments in Happy’s case this fall) 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.

You can read and learn more about the brief on our blog. Thank you for your continued support for our efforts to #FreeHappy!

Kevin Schneider
Executive Director, the NhRP