Our Founder

For centuries, the majority of humans have viewed nonhuman animals as less than and fundamentally different from us. This mentality has enabled the exploitation of nonhuman animals on a vast scale and become embedded in many of our institutions–including courts and legislatures, where nonhuman animals are considered “things” with no rights. Steve dedicated his life to bringing nonhuman animals’ legal status into the 21st century and exposing and ending the injustices they endure because they’re rightless. His vision of a world where nonhuman rights are recognized alongside human rights lives on, and the NhRP remains the only organization of its kind in the world.

Under Steve's leadership, the NhRP secured historic legal firsts for nonhuman animals, catalyzed a global debate about nonhuman rights, and reached billions of people with the message that our most cherished values and principles of justice–liberty, equality, and fairness–should be extended to nonhuman animals, too.

As the NhRP’s lead attorney, Steve filed historic lawsuits demanding the right to liberty of captive chimpanzees and elephants. Historian Jill Lepore called the NhRP's case on behalf of Happy, an Asian elephant held alone in captivity at the Bronx Zoo, “the most important animal-rights case of the 21st-century." The case reached New York's highest court in 2022. Although the court ultimately denied Happy’s petition, two judges wrote historic dissents refuting the idea that only humans can have rights.

Under Steve's leadership, the NhRP worked with Ojai City Council Member Leslie Rule to help develop and pass the first animal rights law in the country in 2023–an ordinance that protects elephants’ right to liberty. “Ojai is a community that cares deeply about animals, and we believe the time has come to look beyond animal welfare laws,” said Ojai Mayor Pro Tem and Council Member Suza Francina.

Steve decided to become a lawyer after developing a deep commitment to social justice as a result of his involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement while an undergraduate at the College of William and Mary. He graduated from Boston University Law School in 1976 and began his legal career as a criminal defense lawyer. Several years later, Peter Singer’s book Animal Liberation inspired Steve to become an animal protection lawyer.

From 1985 to 1995, Steve was president of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. As he told The New York Times Magazine in 2014, his litigation work during this time led him to conclude that the rightlessness of animals was the fundamental barrier to humans vindicating animals’ interests. This is because, under animal welfare laws, lawyers must make the case for how a human has been harmed by the animal’s treatment or situation; as Steve elaborated in his writings and talks, legal injuries to animals do not matter in court because animals are unjustly considered legal “things” with no rights, legally equivalent to inanimate objects, their intrinsic interests essentially invisible to judges.

In 1995, Steve launched the Nonhuman Rights Project to address what he saw as the core issue facing all nonhuman animals and their advocates: nonhuman animals' rightlessness. After more than a decade of preparation, the NhRP filed first-of-their-kind lawsuits in 2013, demanding the fundamental right to liberty protected by common law habeas corpus for four captive chimpanzees in New York State. A year and a half later, two of the NhRP’s clients became the first animals in legal history to have habeas corpus hearings to determine the lawfulness of their imprisonment.

Steve was a leading force in the development of animal law as a distinct academic curriculum, teaching the first-ever animal law course offered at Harvard University in 2000. He remained committed to educating the next generation of animal rights lawyers throughout his career, teaching animal rights jurisprudence at law schools around the world, including Stanford Law School, the University of Miami Law School, St. Thomas University Law School, John Marshall Law School, Lewis and Clark Law School, Vermont Law School, Tel Aviv University, and the Autonomous University of Barcelona.

Steve was the subject of a 2016 Emmy-nominated documentary by acclaimed filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D A Pennebaker, Unlocking the Cage. Over the course of his career, Steve published hundreds of articles, delivered thousands of lectures to audiences worldwide, and was regularly interviewed by local, national, and global media on the subject of nonhuman rights. Steve was the author of four books: Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals (2000); Drawing the Line: Science and the Case for Animal Rights (2002); Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (2005); and An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, and Dominion Along the Banks of the Cape Fear River (2009). He was the co-author, with Samuel Machado and Cynthia Sousa Machado, of a graphic novel about Happy’s case, Thing: Inside the Struggle for Animal Personhood (2023).

Fully committed to Steve's vision, the Nonhuman Rights Project continues to make steady progress in combating centuries of nonhuman animals’ rightlessness and creating systemic change. Donate today to help us grow what Steve started.

Visit Steve's Everloved page to read remembrances of Steve and share your own.

“It was a total epiphany. I just had never thought about what was going on out there with our treatment of animals … Then I thought to myself, well, if I’m interested in social justice, I can’t imagine beings who are being more brutalized than nonhuman animals. People could do whatever they wanted with them and were doing whatever they wanted with them. Nonhuman animals had no rights at all. I couldn’t think of any other place where my participation could do more good.”