The Legal Rights of All Living Things

This article explores the nuances in the development of environmental standing, looking especially at the cases that can inform animal law. Because animals are part of the natural environment and some statutes protecting animals, like the ESA and MMPA, are often characterized as environmental law statutes, several of the critical cases are already animal law cases, including the fundamental case of Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife.12 For the purposes of understanding the development of standing for natural objects, Part I examines these cases in addition to traditional environmental standing cases. Part II addresses the lessons learned from those cases with an eye toward increasing the success of standing arguments in the future. Part III discusses where the jurisprudence of animal law standing will likely diverge from environmental law in the future— the developing idea that as sentient beings, animals should have some sort of legal personhood status and thereby standing in their own right