Sometime soon, according to animal-right activities, a great ape will testify in an American courtroom. Speaking through a voice synthesizer, or perhaps in sign language, the lucky ape will argue that it has a fundamental right to liberty. "This is going to be a very important case." Duke University law Prof. William Reppy Jr. told the New York Times.
Reppy concedes that apes can talk only at the level of a human 4-year-old, so they may not be ready to discuss abstractions like oppression and freedom. Just last month, one ape did manage to say through a synthesizer: "Please buy me a hamburger." That may not sound like crucial testimony, but lawyers think that the spectacle of an ape saying anything at all in court may change a lot of minds about the status of animals as property.
One problem is that apes probably won't be able to convince judges that they know right from wrong, or that they intend to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Since they are not persons, they don't even have legal standing to sue. No problem, says Steven Wise, who taught animal law for 10 years at Vermont law school and is now teaching Harvard law school's first course in the subject. He says lawyers should be able to use slavery-era statutes that authorized legal nonpersons (slaves) to bring lawsuits. Gary Francione, who teaches animal law at Rutgers University, says that gorillas "should be declared to be persons under the constitution."
Unlike mainstream animal-welfare activists, radical animal-rights activists think that all animals are morally equal and have rights, though not necessarily the same rights as humans. So the law's denial of rights to animals is simply a matter of bias-speciesism. It's even an expression of bias to talk about protecting wildlife, since this assumes that human control and domination of other species is acceptable. These are surely far-out ideas. "Would even bacteria have rights？" asks one exasperated law professor, Richard Epstein of the University of Chicago Law School.
For the moment, the radicals want to confine the rights discussion to apes and chimps, mostly to avoid the obvious mockery about litigious lemmings, cockroach liberation, and the issue of whether a hyena eating an antelope is committing a rights violation that should be brought before the world court in the Hague. One wag wrote a poem containing the line, "Every beast within his paws/Will clutch an order to show cause."
The news is that law schools are increasingly involved in animal issues. Any radical notion that vastly inflates the concept of rights and requires a lot more litigation is apt to take root in the law schools. ("Some lawyers say they are in the field to advance their ideology, but some note that it is an area of legal practice that could be profitable," reports the New York Times.)
A dozen law schools now feature courses on animal law, and in some cases at least, the teaching seems to be a simple extension of radical activism. The course description of next spring's "Animal Law Seminar" at Georgetown University Law Center, for instance, makes clear to students which opinions are the correct ones to have, It talks about the plight of "rightless plaintiffs" and promises to examine how and why laws "purporting to protect" animals have failed.
Ideas about humane treatment of animals are indeed changing. Many of us have changed our minds about furs, zoos, slaughterhouse techniques, and at least some forms of animal experimentation. The debate about greater concern for the animal world continues. But the alliance between the radicals and the lawyers means that, once again, an issue that ought to be taken to the people and resolved by democratic means will most likely be pre-empted by judges and lawyers. Steven Wise talks of using the courts to knock down the wall between humans and apes. Once apes have rights, he says, the status of other animals can be decided

A. be taken to the public and resolved by democratic means
B. be resolved by a few judges and lawyers
C. be looked on as a mockery
D. be confined to such animals as apes