Legal News

To the Dogs: How Could Trouble Get So Rich?

By Dan Slater

Leona Helmsley’s dog, Trouble, photographed in Helmsley’s New York apartment in 2003. (Credit: Associated Press/Jennifer Graylock)

In June, we noted the legal battle surrounding Leona Helmsley’s $12 million bequest to her dog, Trouble (pictured), making the Maltese poodle the biggest winner of Helmsley’s will. Manhattan Surrogate Court Judge Renee Roth, along with New York State’s Attorney General’s Office, reduced Trouble’s trust fund to $2 million.

In this week’s New Yorker magazine, legal reporter Jeffrey Toobin takes a look at Trouble’s bequest and the “quiet revolution in the law” that’s been engineered by “animal companions” and lawyers to allow non-humans to inherit and spend money.

Toobin provides the history behind the movement:

The modern history of legal rights for animals begins with a chimpanzee named Washoe. “He was the first ‘signing chimp,’ the first chimpanzee who learned sign language to communicate with people,” Victoria Bjorklund, the head of the exempt-organizations practice at the New York law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, said. “There came a time when he was going to be sent off to be used in medical testing, and there was a lot of distress about that possibility.” So Bjorklund and others set up a trust (funded with the proceeds of a book about Washoe), and appointed a guardian to protect him and several other chimps like him. The problem was that New York law said that a guardian could be appointed for a “person with a disability.” Was Washoe a “person” under New York law? . . .The lawyers at Simpson Thacher argued that “the mental, emotional, sociological, and biological characteristics” of Washoe and the other chimps “warrant their treatment as persons” entitled to representation. . . .In a 1997 decision, the surrogate of Nassau County agreed and appointed a guardian to administer the trust for the benefit of the chimps.

In 1990, Jane Hoffman, a former Simpson associate, and a group of other lawyers founded a new committee at the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, on “Legal Issues Pertaining to Animals.” In 1996, writes Toobin, they helped change the law to make it easier for any animal—especially a pet—to become the beneficiary of a trust.

“What the law is doing is catching up with the idea that people don’t consider their pets property, in the way a car or a chair is,” Hoffman says. “I am not pumping for my cats to be able to vote for McCain or Obama. I’m not saying they could visit me at the hospital, though that’s probably a pretty good idea. The right category for pets is closer to children, who can’t vote, and can’t own property, but you can’t inflict pain on them, either. The law is catching up with societal beliefs.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 22, 2008 (boomark / email).