Steven M. Wise

Steven M. Wise (born 1952) is an American legal scholar who specializes in animal protection issues, primatology, and animal intelligence. He teaches animal rights law at Harvard Law School, Vermont Law School, John Marshall Law School, and Tufts University School of Veterinary Medicine. He is a former president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and founder and president of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights. "About the author", Steven Wise's home page. He is a partner with the law firm Wise & Slater Wise in Boston.

Wise is the author of Though the Heavens May Fall (2005), which recounts the 1772 trial in England of James Somerset, a black man rescued from a ship heading for the West Indies slave markets, which set in motion the movement to abolish slavery in Britain and the United States (see also Mansfield Decision); Drawing the Line (2002), which describes the relative intelligence of animals and human beings; and Rattling the Cage (2000), in which he argues that legal rights should be extended to chimpanzees and bonobos.

The Yale Law Review has called Wise "one of the pistons of the animal rights movement." Website of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights.

Background

Wise was awarded his J.D from Boston University in 1976, and became a personal injury lawyer. He was inspired to move into the area of animal rights after reading Peter Singer's Animal Liberation (1975), "Biography - Wise, Steven M.", Contemporary Authors - 2004, Gale Reference Team, Thomson Gale. often referred to as the bible of the animal liberation movement.

Animal personhood

Wise's position on animal rights is that some animals, particularly primates, meet the criteria of legal personhood and should therefore be awarded certain rights and protections. His criteria for personhood are that the animal must be able to desire things, must be able to act in an intentional manner to acquire those things, and must have a sense of self i.e. it must know that it exists. Wise argues that chimpanzees, bonobos, elephants, parrots, dolphins, orangutans, and gorillas meet these criteria.

Wise argues that these animals should have legal personhood bestowed upon them to protect them from "serious infringements upon their bodily integrity and bodily liberty." Without personhood in law, he writes that you are "invisible to civil law" and "might as well be dead." Sunstein, Cass R. "The Chimps' Day in Court", New York Times Book Review, February 20, 2000.

He writes:

For four thousand years, a thick and impenetrable legal wall has separated all human from all nonhuman animals. On one side, even the most trivial interests of a single species — ours — are jealously guarded. We have assigned ourselves, alone among the million animal species, the status of "legal persons." On the other side of that wall lies the legal refuse of an entire kingdom, not just chimpanzees and bonobos but also gorillas, orangutans, and monkeys, dogs, elephants, and dolphins. They are "legal things." Their most basic and fundamental interests — their pains, their lives, their freedoms — are intentionally ignored, often maliciously trampled, and routinely abused. Ancient philosophers claimed that all nonhuman animals had been designed and placed on this earth just for human beings. Ancient jurists declared that law had been created just for human beings. Although philosophy and science have long since recanted, the law has not.Wise, Steven. "The Problem with Being a Thing", Chapter One of Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals.

In Rattling the Cage, Wise offers examples of primates who he believes have suffered unjustifiably. He writes about Jerom, a chimpanzee who lived alone in a small cage in the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, with no access to sunlight, after being infected with one strain of HIV when he was three, another at the age of four, and a third at the age of five, before dying in 1996 at the age of 14.

Wise also tells the story of Lucy Temerlin, a six-year-old chimpanzee who learned American Sign Language from Roger Fouts, the primatologist. Fouts would arrive at Lucy's home at 8:30 every morning, when Lucy would greet him with a hug, go to the stove, take the kettle, fill it with water from the sink, find two cups and tea bags from the cupboard, and brew and serve the tea. When she was 12, the Temerlins were no longer able to care for her. She was sent to a chimpanzee rehabilitation center in Senegal, then flown to Gambia, where she was shot and skinned by a poacher, and her feet and hands hacked off for sale as trophies.

Works

Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, Perseus Books, Cambridge, MA, 2000.
Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights, Perseus Publishing, Cambridge, MA, 2002.
Though the Heavens May Fall, Perseus Books, Cambridge, MA, 2005.

Notes

References

"Biography - Wise, Steven M.", Contemporary Authors - 2004, Gale Reference Team, Thomson Gale.
"About the author", Steven Wise's home page.
Website of the Center for the Expansion of Fundamental Rights.
Sunstein, Cass R. "The Chimps' Day in Court", New York Times Book Review, February 20, 2000.
Wise, Steven. "The Problem with Being a Thing", Chapter One of Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals.

Background

Animal personhood

Works

See also

Notes

References

Further reading

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Steven M. Wise

Background

Animal personhood

Works

See also

Notes

References

Further reading