LAW Alum Steven M. Wise, Who Fought for Animal Rights, Dies
Pioneer was founder and president of the Nonhuman Rights Project
Steven Wise championed legal personhood for chimpanzees and bonobos.
LAW Alum Steven M. Wise, Who Fought for Animal Rights, Dies
Pioneer was founder and president of the Nonhuman Rights Project
Steven M. Wise was a socially conscious student who protested the Vietnam War while at the College of William & Mary. As a lawyer, he began taking on animal welfare cases after reading Animal Liberation by the philosopher Peter Singer and spent the rest of his career fighting for animal rights.
Animal lives, Wise said in a 2017 Bostonia profile, “are as important to them as our life is to us. Or as important to their families as ours is. If you kill a mother chimpanzee, it means the children are going to die. If you kill the matriarch of an elephant herd, they may all die. The amount of wisdom and knowledge in the repository of the female matriarch is critical to the survival of the entire group.”
Wise (LAW’76), founder and president of the civil rights organization Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP), died on February 15, 2024, at his Florida home. He was 73.
In 1990, Wise began teaching one of the country’s first animal law classes, at Vermont Law School. For decades, he fought for the rights of chimpanzees, for example, arguing in courts “that humans should not have the right to keep them at all, because chimpanzees are autonomous beings with advanced minds that make them suffer in captivity, especially solitary confinement, just as a human locked in a cage would suffer,” according to the Bostonia profile.
Among his books were Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (Perseus Publishing, 2000), which called for legal personhood for chimpanzees and bonobos, and Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (Basic Books, 2002). His work was the subject of a 2016 documentary, Unlocking the Cage.
“The number of nonhuman animals that are killed, as we’re speaking, is fantastic,” he told Bostonia. “The more we understand about them”—at least higher creatures like the great apes—“the more we realize how extraordinary they are.”
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.