UDTR Global Rights of Nature Radar

Nature’s Personhood and Property’s Virtues

Identification

Public canonical key

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3538522

Authors

Laura · Eduardo Moises

Reported year

2020

Reported language

en · eng

Source type

Article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:04:47.556692+00:00

Last metadata observation

2026-11-09T19:06:39.431099+00:00

Last HTTP verification

Not checked

Institutions reported by the source

Cornell University · University of New Mexico

Reported affiliation countries

US

Documentary abstract — original language

In The Colorado River Ecosystem v. State of Colorado, plaintiff asked a federal district court to find that the Colorado River ecosystem is a legal person, arguing that, “[t]he dominance of a culture that defines nature as property enables its destruction.” Plaintiff’s principal claim rested on the assumption that legal personality could do something for the river that a system of property cannot. In making its case, plaintiff relied on the emergence of what it called a “new kind of environmental law,” pointing to examples where nature had been extended elements of personhood by courts and legislatures in India, New Zealand, Ecuador and Colombia. In this essay, we evaluate the basic strategy of claiming personhood for the Colorado River and other natural objects as a way to advance environmental goals in the legal domain. We explore the normative foundation of the claim — elements of nature are legal persons — and the work personhood is being asked to do by plaintiff and other environmental activists. We identify three possibilities: procedural, substantive and rhetorical. Of those, we suggest plaintiff’s strongest case is rhetorical. But we say this not only because it will likely be difficult to convince a judge to extend standing or substantive rights to a natural object, but because we are unconvinced that personhood would achieve the ends desired by plaintiff and other rights of nature advocates. We contrast the rights of nature movement cases with strategies used by plaintiffs in another case, Juliana v. the US, and conclude that existing legal tools rooted in the law of property offer a more certain, and therefore more promising, pathway to achieving many of the goals articulated by rights of nature advocates in the United States.

Identifiers

DOI

10.2139/ssrn.3538522

OPENALEX

W3024725366

OPENAIRE

doi_dedup___::c838872fc097983bb87e702ef80568dd

Documentary context

Documentary family

Scholarship

Source-reported types

Article · preprint

Natural entities mentioned

River · Ecosystem

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

Sources

OpenAIRE · Record 1

OpenAlex · Record 1 · Record 2

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3538522
• OpenAlex · https://openalex.org/W3024725366

Documented bibliographic relations

Source-declared references and links; they do not establish legal support or UGLC qualification. Up to 20 outgoing references are displayed.

• openalex:w1483950702 · CITES
• openalex:w1514769873 · CITES
• openalex:w1519051354 · CITES
• openalex:w1527163437 · CITES
• openalex:w2084202217 · CITES
• openalex:w2101639466 · CITES
• openalex:w2795392489 · CITES
• openalex:w2797910919 · CITES

3 incoming references within the detected corpus

Documentary status

Documentary validated

Library