Marceau, on a farm in Woodstock, Vermont. He spoke at nearby Vermont Law School on July 28. Photograph: Richard W. Brown. Click image to enlarge.

The Constitution doesn’t directly grant rights to animals. But Justin Marceau believes “law has and always does” evolve with scientific understanding—what seemed “radical” to the founding fathers is not necessarily so today. Last year he was named to hold the country’s first chair in animal law, at the University of Denver’s Sturm College of Law. Of counsel to the national Animal Legal Defense Fund since 2012, he and the ALDF earlier this year sued Yellowstone National Park to lift its ban on public viewing of a planned killing of 900 bison, with the aim of rallying opposition to the practice (the suit is pending). And in 2015 he and the ALDF persuaded Idaho’s federal district court to rule that a statute criminalizing undercover investigations of industrial farms violated the First Amendment. He’s now litigating similar “ag-gag” laws in three states.

The native Montanan thought little about animal law until his third year at Harvard Law School, when he took a survey course in the nascent field (today 130 law schools offer courses). He often cites changing mores to defend animal advocates. In “Killing for Your Dog” (George Washington Law Review, April 2015), the former philosophy major proposed a statute allowing owners to use force against an individual who threatens a pet with harm. Pets today have “a cherished place in the American family,” he writes, “and to the extent the criminal law treats a serious threat to one’s dog as legally equivalent to stealing hubcaps . . . [it] misses the mark.”

Ultimately, Marceau says, “animals should have rights that are commensurate with their capacity for physical activities and mental cognition,” and he’s willing to push the envelope to extend protections. In August 2016, he filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals contending that a macaque monkey named Naruto owns the selfies it took with obvious intent on a visitor’s camera; any portrait sales, Marceau said, should go to the sanctuary on which Naruto lives (a decision is pending). U.S. copyright law ascribes intellectual property to the author, he notes, “but it doesn’t say the author has to be a person.”

After law school, Marceau clerked with the Ninth Circuit and then represented condemned inmates as a federal public defender in Arizona before joining the Sturm faculty in 2008. He’s currently suing the state of Oklahoma for the execution of inmate Clayton Lockett, who died a painful 43 minutes after a lethal injection in 2014. “The world has a variety of ills,” Marceau says. “I just happen to have skills and interests in the death penalty and in animals.”

Read more by Zachary Jason