Grasping for Air

Steven Wise & the Nonhuman Rights Project

Background:

As a young law school graduate in 1980, Steven Wise read Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals, by Peter Singer, which said that animals were being harmed in many ways. Wise was troubled by this and decided to practice law for the interests of animals. He started out working for the Animal Legal Defense Fund, but came to believe that litigating for improved treatment of animals wasn't enough. The real problem, in his mind, was that animals were thought of as "things," rather than "persons." Only persons had legal standing in courts of law.

So he shifted focus to a longer-term campaign to have...