The 21st century has witnessed the emergence of a new tool intended to address the seemingly intractable issue of environmental destruction- legal personhood for nature. While jurists, legislators, and activists alike have successfully institutionalized this particular ontological innovation across various jurisdictions, alternative strategies designed to bring a range of non-human entities, including animals and artificial intelligence, into the legal realm have gone largely unnoticed. This presentation seeks to correct for this oversight by exploring the potential of several proposals that disrupt conventional notions of legal personhood in ways that strive to overcome challenges inherent to the incorporation of the more-than-human world. The talk concludes with a call for policymakers and advocates to reconsider the extant approach to legal personhood for nature.

1. Josh Gellers, PhD
July 6-7, 2023
UNSW Workshop

2. How should we answer the
non-human question?
1

3. Points of
Intervention
2
Justice
Ethics
Systems
Level
of
Abstraction
Constructs

4. To what extent, if any, should we
include the more-than-human
world in our legal universe?
3

5. Modes of Change
Status Quo
No change to existing hegemonic
institutions
Reformist
Within/revising existing hegemonic
institutions, slow
Radical
Outside/disrupting existing
hegemonic institutions, fast
4

6. What is a Legal Person?
Natural person v. legal person
Natural person and legal person
Entity in law that possesses different
legal personalities (Grear 2013)
Bundle of rights and duties (Kurki 2022)
5

7. Purpose of (Extending) Legal Personhood
Instrumental
(Pain & Pepper 2021)
Axiological
(Athens 2018)
Epistemic
(Alix 2023)
6

8. Problems Facing Legal Personhood
• Anthropocentrism v. bio/ecocentrism
• Dualism v. complexity
• Universalism v. relativism
• Properties v. relations
• Individualism v. holism
• Person v. rights
7

9. Proposals
AI
• Gradient legal
personhood
(Mocanu 2022)
• Hybrid model
(Raskulla 2023)
Animals
• Non-personal
subjects of law
(Pietrzykowski
2018)
• Quasi-
property/quasi-
personhood
(Fernandez
2019)
Nature
• Environmental
personhood
(Gordon 2018)
• Cosmic person
(Norman 2021)
Non-humans
• Multi-spectral
framework for
personhoods
(Gellers 2020)
8

10. Synthesis
DETERMINE THE
DESIRED MODE OF
CHANGE
01
CONSIDER THE
CONTEXT
02
IDENTIFY, ADOPT,
AND IMPLEMENT
BEST FIT APPROACH
03
9

11. Lingering
Questions
• Is legal personhood the best route to follow
given our objectives?
• Why don’t we just extend legal rights directly
to nature?
• Who should decide which legal rights nature
possesses?
• How can we identify the interests of nature
and translate them into concrete legal
responsibilities?
• What if bestowing legal personhood onto
nature does not yield improvements in
environmental quality or protection?
• Whither the relevance of law in the
Anthropocene?
10

12. Concluding
Thoughts
• No “one-size-fits-all” model, but solutions
should be local, not global
• There is a moral obligation to eliminate
obsolete binaries and cast aside the “One-
World World” (Law 2015) in favor of
“pluriversal politics” (Escobar 2020)
• Legal systems need to be equipped to de-
center human interests
• We must transition from “law as language” to
“law as lifeway” (Vargas Roncancio 2023) and
from representation to “listening-with”
(Carvalho & Riquito 2022)
• Achieving the above can only be accomplished
through radical departures from extant law
11

13. Contact:
(e) josh.gellers@unf.edu
(t) @JoshGellers 12
Thank you!
Questions?

14. Criticisms and Responses
Impossible
Unhelpful
Mistaken
Zero-Sum
“In passing the [Rights of Nature] into Ponca tribal law, for the first time we saw
our Indigenous values and rights reflected in Western law. We are not people
protecting Nature, we are Nature protecting itself. This is a powerful way to create
system change” (Camp-Horinek 2020, cited in Kaufmann & Martin 2021).
13
”If there is one characteristic shared by companies, foundations,
associations, commercial trusts, nationalities, peoples, communities,
collectives and Nature, it is the fact that none of these subjects of law
are human persons” (Estrellita Monkey Decision 2022: 27, n86).
“Rights by themselves are not a zero-sum game. The addition of a newly
recognized right does not vitiate a previously recognized right” (Schulz &
Raman 2020: 15).
“The above cases undermine previous analyses suggesting that RoN in
Ecuador are merely symbolic and unimplemented as a result of judicial
corruption and structural barriers” (Kauffman & Martin 2023: 29).
(Betaille 2019)
(Kurki 2022)
(Bryson et al. 2017)
(Tănăsescu 2020)

15. Ontological
Properties
Personhoods Positions/Incidents
Consciousness, Intentionality, Sentience
Autonomy, Intelligence, Rationality,
Responsibility, Will
Capacity to be a legal subject, possess
rights, endure burdens
Animism, Anthropomorphism, Facing,
Felt nearness, Kinship, Personification,
Self-realization
Relational
Legal
Moral
Psychological
Moral Agent/
Patient
Moral Duties/Sanctions
Legal Rights/Duties
Legal Privileges/No-rights
Legal Powers/Liabilities
Legal Immunities/Disabilities
Moral Immunities/No-abilities
Moral Claims/Duties
Moral Liberties/No-duties
Moral Powers/Intentions
Moral
Rights
Relational
Mechanisms
Societal need
Dignity
Conceptual Map
Legal Subject/
Object

16. A Multi-spectral
Framework for
Personhoods
15
Social-Relational
Social-Ecological

17. Analytical Keys
16
Argument from
Marginal Cases
“the point is to demand
consistency in our
thinking about animals”
(Tanner 2009: 52)
Post-Colonialism
“the racialized Mechanical
Other operates like any
other marginalized group”
(Kim 2022)
Anthropocene
“legal relations…as always
and already part of more-
than-human collectives”
(Fleurke et al. 2022)