Harvard ponders animal rights

Harvard Law School will offer a course in animal rights law next semester for the first time in its 182-year history to deal with the increasing number of issues relating to subjects such as experimental animal cloning.

Calling animal rights an emerging legal specialisation, the school will teach that while "nonhuman animals are not legal persons and have no legal rights, they do have a small number of legal protections", according to the course description.

The new course, Animal Rights Law, will review these protections, and the difficulties of attaining standing in the courts for nonhumans.

"Many of our students can expect to face an animal law issue at some point in their careers, especially those specialising in patent and intellectual property law, international trade, land use or environmental law, criminal prosecution or defence, or constitutional law," said Alan Ray, the school's assistant dean for academic affairs. The expansion of experimental animal cloning, he said, "is just one example in the intellectual property context where animal law issues have arisen".

The course will be taught by Steven Wise, a lecturer and author of the forthcoming book Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals. Mr Wise's private law practice focuses almost entirely on animal-related litigation, and he is a past president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund.

The course "will discuss the sources and characteristics of fundamental rights, why humans are entitled to them, why nonhuman animals have been denied them, whether legal rights should be limited to humans and, if not, what nonhuman animals should be entitled to them under the common law".

Students will examine in detail arguments for and against the entitlement of chimpanzees and bonobo monkeys, which are used extensively in scientific research, to be protected from bodily harm. Several smaller American law schools already offer classes in animal rights.