ABSTRACT
Not until the nineteenth century was slavery abolished in the West and every human formally cloaked with the legal personhood that signifies eligibility for fundamental legal rights. On encountering this legal wall, one is initially awed by its thickness, its height, and its history of success at all levels of law in maintaining the legal apartheid between the human and every other animal. It is not surprising because they draw from a common well: International law, constitutional law, statutory law, the common law, and the civil law all treat nonhuman animals in nearly the same ways. The legal thinghood of all nonhuman animals is as ancient and as deeply woven into the fabric of our law as is any legal rule. But this ancient legal rule, as applied to the great apes, is so unfair and so outright contradictory to the overarching and sacred principles of liberty, equality, and justice that reasoned judicial decision making must reject it.
