I’ve gotten behind in my coverage of the elephant habeas petitions brought by Steven Wise and his Nonhuman Rights Project. My last update involved an unusual attempt by the NhRP to file a habeas corpus petition directly in an appellate court. Now, I don’t know anything about California habeas corpus law, but I do know that federal law authorizes any trial or appellate judge, including justices of the Supreme Court, to grant writ of habeas corpus. In practice, do the justices of the Supreme Court go around granting writs of habeas corpus? No, of course not. Such statutes are there fore truly exceptional circumstances, but in general, if you want a writ of habeas corpus, you have to seek one in the trial court first. So I don’t know what the NhRP was trying to accomplish. But what it got, in an order from May 2023, was what you might expect: a one-sentence order denying the petition.