Just weeks after Gary Francione threw in the towel on the Rutgers Animal Law
Clinic after blaming the supposed conservative, anti-animal rights environment
on American campuses, one of the nation’s most prestigious law schools
announced that for the first time it will offer an elective class focusing on
animal rights.
Harvard Law School will offer its first animal rights course next year. Harvard
went out and hired animal rights activist attorney Steven Wise to teach the
new course. Wise, a past president of the Animal Legal Defense Fun and current
president of the Center for Expansion of Fundamental Rights has litigated numerous
animal rights cases at the state and federal level.
In its press release on the course, Harvard Law School quotes extensively from
the course description of the class written by Wise, which bears repeating:
[students will] learn that non-human animals are not legal persons and have
no legal rights. They do have a small number of legal protections. We will
review some of these protections and delve into the difficulties of attaining
standing to litigate in the interests of nonhuman animals. However, for the
last 25 years, demands that at least some other animals be given at least
some fundamental legal rights have been rising.We will discuss the sources and characteristics of fundamental rights, why
humans are entitled to them, why nonhuman animals have been denied them, whether
legal rights should be limited to humans and, if not, what nonhuman animals
should be entitled to them under the common law, and to which legal rights
they should be entitled. Finally, we will examine in detail the arguments
for and against the entitlement of chimpanzees and bonobos to the common law
rights to bodily integrity and bodily liberty.
The last paragraph is especially interesting since the stated purpose of Wise’s
Center for Expansion of Fundamental Rights is to extend fundamental rights to
chimpanzees and bonobos.
Although a few other law schools offer courses on animal rights, Harvard’s
decisions could pave the way for the widespread adoption of animal rights courses
across the country. As Pamela Frasch, who teaches an animal law course at Northwestern
School of Law of Lewis and Clark College, told the Associated Press, “Everybody
I know that teaches animal law was absolutely thrilled to hear that Harvard
was going to offer it. It’s just reality that if Harvard is going to teach
it, that other schools that might have looked askance at it as a legitimate
area of study might take another look.”
Alan Ray, Harvard Law School’s assistant dean for academic affairs, defended
the course by saying, “It took a 13th Amendment to the Constitution for
us to outlaw slavery at a time when people were treated as property because
of the color of their skin. There are occasions in the law for taking a very
fundamental look at the treatment of other living things.”
With Princeton’s hiring of Peter Singer and Harvard’s hiring of Wise,
the day will not be too far off when our universities will find scientists on
one end of campus victimized by animal rights terrorists while legal professors
on the other side of campus teach students that the violent activists are simply
modern day abolitionists.