William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review
Abstract
The common law of Colorado embraces all of the premises necessary to conclude that non-human animals are legal persons who may bring suits on their own behalf. All that is necessary is for a case to bring those premises together. The state endorses a Hohfeldian understanding of rights and duties, meaning the two concepts are necessarily corollaries. So, humans’ existing statutory duty to avoid being cruel to animals entails that those same animals have a right to be free from cruelty under state statute. Then, premised on a long line of legal philosophy and the state’s understanding of “legal personhood,” the fact that non-human animals have a right grants them a limited form of personhood under the law. Therefore, non-human animals should be able to bring suits on their own behalf in limited instances. This Article argues that a lawsuit with an animal plaintiff in the mold of the Oregon case Justice v. Vercher could be successful despite, and perhaps because of, the Colorado Supreme Court’s recent rejection of habeas corpus for elephants in Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Cheyenne Mountain Zoological Society.
Repository Citation
Mason Liddell, Justice in Colorado: Achieving Animal Plaintiffhood Through the State's Common Law, 50 Wm. & Mary Env’t L. & Pol'y Rev. 43 (2025), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmelpr/vol50/iss1/3Included in
Animal Law Commons, Environmental Law Commons, Litigation Commons