ABSTRACT
Legal categories have their foundation in God’s ordering of the universe. The precise understanding of the place of humans and animals in that order has been contentious, as humans are also subject to law’s artificial reason. Human beings in their sociality and provision of mutual aid go far beyond animals, being distinctive in their respect for property rights, their rationality, and capacity for speech. The English theologian Nathaniel Culverwell satirized this shared natural law as an attempt to bring animals within the domain of conventional law: ‘for certainly these men mean to bring beasts, birds and fishes into their Courts, and to have some fees out of them’. The process from the legal thinghood to the legal personhood of qualified non-human animals ‘beginning with chimpanzees and bonobos’ would, after the necessary ‘minor legal revolution’, follow from ordinary common law principles. Courts deny dignity-rights for animals ‘in the teeth of empirical evidence that at least some nonhuman animals possess it.’
