Because animals need representation too?

West Word writes:

Legal Beagle: The University of Denver Creates Professorship for Animal Law

Justin Marceau doesn’t eat animals. He represents them.

And starting this fall, he will teach University of Denver law students to do the same, thanks to the school’s new Animal Legal Defense Fund (ALDF) Professorship. Marceau is the first recipient of the professorship, which DU says is the only position of its kind in the country.

Unlike Jennifer Edwards of the Animal Law Center (see our cover story, “Animal Law Is a Growing Field Because of Conflict Between Humans & Non-Humans”) a meat-eater who makes sure her dinners are humanely raised, Marceau, a vegan, doesn’t work in the animal-law trenches defending biting dogs and overweight pigs. His work has primarily been on big-picture cases that deal with how animals are treated in the law. For example, he’ll serve as an expert in a pending case filed in New York arguing that two research chimps, Hercules and Leo, are “autonomous and self-determining beings” who shouldn’t be imprisoned against their will. The lawyer, Steven Wise of the Nonhuman Rights Project, has requested that Hercules and Leo be granted a writ of habeas corpus, which is used to protect people from being unlawfully held. In granting a writ, the court would essentially be saying that chimps are people in the eyes of the law.