Steven Wise

Activist, Lawyer, World traveler, Writer/Editor

I am an animal rights lawyer. I wasn't always one. I have a chemistry degree. I was a new trial lawyer until 1980. Then I read ANIMAL LIBERATION by the Australian philosopher, Peter Singer. It changed my life. Overnight I became an animal protection lawyer. I would not become an animals rights lawyer for 33 more years. By 1985 I realized a Great Legal Wall divided humans from the other animals. On one side of that wall every human is a legal “person" with the capacity for unlimited legal rights. On the other side, the rest of the animals are considered legal “things” that lack the capacity for any legal rights at all. I was unable to protect the most fundamental interests of any of them. I decided to spend my life trying to change that. I figured it would take 30 years to prepare the first lawsuits. It only took 28. I began to write law review articles and essays and teach “Animal Rights Law” at law schools. In 2000 I taught the first class in “Animal Rights Law” at the Harvard Law School and became a writer of books. RATTLING THE CAGE - TOWARDS LEGAL RIGHTS FOR ANIMALS (2000) set out my basic legal arguments. I simplified and improved them in DRAWING THE LINE - SCIENCE AND THE CASE FOR ANIMAL RIGHTS (2003). Two years later came THOUGH THE HEAVENS MAY FALL - THE LANDMARK TRIAL THAT LED TO THE END OF HUMAN SLAVERY (2005), which told the story of how James Somerset. a black slave kidnapped from West Africa as a boy, used a common law writ of habeas corpus in London’s Court of Kings Bench to free himself and have human slavery declared “so odious” the English common law would not support it. I meant RATTLING THE CAGE as a blueprint for how to do the same for enslaved nonhumans. In 2007, the time to plan the first specific cases arrived. I was fortunate to attract dozens of talented and committed law students, lawyers, professors, natural scientists, social scientists, mathematicians, and social media whizzes, all intent on winning lawsuits in which high courts declare that a nonhuman animal is a legal "person" possessed of such basic legal rights as bodily liberty and bodily integrity. It became The Nonhuman Rights Project. It took 30,000 hours to prepare those initial lawsuits. We filed them, three common law habeas corpus suits, just like in the SOMERSET case, on behalf of four chimpanzees who were imprisoned all across the state of New York in December, 2013, and included 100 pages of affidavits from some of the most experienced and talented chimpanzee researchers who have ever lived. That was the day I became an animal rights lawyer. They demonstrated that chimpanzees were autonomous and self-determining individuals who possess a large array of advanced cognitive abilities. We argued that our chimpanzee plaintiffs were therefore entitled to entitled to be legal “persons” for the purpose of freeing them from the slavery in which they were forced to live their lives. These lawsuits are working their ways through New York’s appellate courts. Meanwhile the Nonhuman Rights Project is preparing to file further suits in other states on behalf of other great apes, elephants, and cetaceans (dolphins and whales) demanding their personhood and freedom in the United States, while working with other lawyers on four continents to achieve the same goal in their countries. I was fortunate that documentary, "A Legal Person," was made about my work in 2001. The Nonhuman Rights Project is more fortunate to be the subject of a documentary by two of the most respected documentary filmmakers in the world, D.A. Pennebaker - who became the first documentary filmmaker to be awarded an Oscar for Lifetime Achievement, in December of 2012 - and his wife and filmmaker partner, Chris Hegedus. Four four years they have filmed our struggle years to prepare those first three habeas corpus lawsuits on behalf of chimpanzees. They will follow us until we reach the end of the judicial line in New York, win or lose, sometime in 2015. Their work will end. Our work is just beginning. It was given a tremendous boost by the hundreds of media reports that followed our initial litigation, including a cover story for the April, 2014 SUNDAY NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE, which you can read here: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/magazine/the-rights-of-man-and-beast.html?ref=magazine&_r=0, an opportunity to spar with Stephen Colbert on THE COLBERT REPORT on July 17, 2014, to be seen here, http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/70ezhu/steven-m--wiseand a short “op-doc” by Pennebaker and Hegedus about the work of the Nonhuman Rights Project that you may view here:http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000002839672/animals-are-persons-too.html?playlistId=100000001150263. Accompanying my TED2015 talk will be extraordinary portraits of apes that were taken by the photographer, James Mollison, and collected in his book, “James and Other Apes.” These portraits capture the dignity and autonomy of these magnificent creature better than I can explain th

helping people change their understanding about the relationship between human and nonhuman animals. After three million years, it's time to re-evaluate. Traveling the world. Making friends. My kids.

Animal Rights Jurisprudence

singing.