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The rights of nature
Published in Joshua C. Gellers, Rights for Robots, 2020
Second, who or what counts as a legal person? In mainstream Western conceptions of law, a “legal person” often refers to a nonhuman entity that possesses legal personality, such as a corporation,21 while the term “natural person” usually denotes a human being (Grear, 2013, p. 78). The law treats the latter as the quintessential rational subject, the fulcrum around which objects like the environment must rotate. Throughout history, the privileged position occupied by the natural person has permitted legal discrimination among members of the human species (i.e., intra-species hierarchy) and against animals, ecosystems, and other nonhuman entities (i.e., inter-species hierarchy) (Grear, 2015, p. 230). The elevated status conferred upon humans by contemporary legal systems is predicated on the idea that we alone possess dignity and reason, and thus law must work to advance the human good (Pietrzykowski, 2017, p. 49).
Nature's Rights through Lawmaking in the United States
Published in Cameron La Follette, Chris Maser, Sustainability and the Rights of Nature in Practice, 2019
Lindsey Schromen-Wawrin, Michelle Amelia Newman
The western legal system generally divides things into two categories: persons and property. Persons can have rights. Property, which includes Nature, cannot. But turning Nature from ‘property’ to ‘person’ is just the first step. A legal ‘person’ is often defined as having the ability to contract, own property, sue and be sued. Legal persons can also have rights, but not every legal person has the same rights. But categorically, ‘property’ does not have rights. Thus, the framework of ‘person’ versus ‘property’ is useful for understanding the legal transformation needed for ecosystem rights. But the details about what rights an ecosystem has, and what those rights mean, are not inherently answered simply by putting Nature in the ‘person’ category.
Commercial Law and Competition Law
Published in Ron Bartsch, International Aviation Law, 2018
A company, to complete this rather extended metaphor, becomes a legal person upon incorporation, just as a child becomes a legal person upon his or her birth. The difference is that a company is created with full legal capacity at the moment it is incorporated. As such, it is legally separate from the people who constitute it. This concept creates what is known variously as the veil of incorporation or the corporate veil.
Legal personality and economic livelihood of the Whanganui River: a call for community entrepreneurship
Published in Water International, 2019
Aikaterini Argyrou, Harry Hummels
Accordingly, anyone or anything can acquire legal personhood, including non-human objects of nature such as the river, depending on the human will. Humans decide what is to be treated as a subject of rights and duties, within certain legal relationships and based on certain human and societal objectives (Naffine, 2003). Moreover, humans act as the guardians of both the rights and the duties provided to non-human objects. Shelton (2015, paras. 22–23) defines a legal person as an ‘artificial’ entity ‘that is not a human being, but one on which society has decided to confer specific rights and obligations’. Criteria that have been used to define the provision of legal personhood to entities include ‘biological life, genetic humanness, brain development, ability to feel pain, consciousness/sentience, ability to communicate, ability to form relationships, higher reasoning ability, and rationality’ (paras. 22–23). Therefore, a second group of legal scholars considers that only humans can be legal persons, starting from their birth and for as long as their biological life extends (Naffine, 2003). The third group of legal scholars says that only ‘rational’ and fully competent humans can have a legal personhood, which is directly related to their capacity to initiate or terminate legal proceedings (Naffine, 2003). According to the first group, a river can be sensibly provided legal personhood. The second and the third groups disagree, because a river does not have biological life or human rationality.