The HBS hosts discuss legal personhood and rights for rivers, lakes, and mountains with Dr. Stewart Motha.

In most discussions about extending rights or legal personhood to non-humans, the focus tends to be on robots/machines or non-human animals. However, given our current global climate crisis, we have good reason to ask: isn’t it time to devote more attention to the rights– and perhaps legal and moral “personhood”– of natural entities? What sorts of protections might be extended by the law if our notion of personhood were expanded? 

This is not an easily answered question, of course, because natural entities still face the challenge of being accorded “legal standing” in order to bring suit in their own names. (Names that we humans have given them!) Some progress has been made on this front by organizations like Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, who have been granted the right of “representational standing” by various courts, but we’re still a long way from practically negotiating our understanding of the difference between physis (nature) and nomos (law) in a way that actually protects Nature.

This week, we are joined by Dr. Stewart Motha, Executive Dean of Birkbeck Law School, University of London to discuss the challenge and promise of extending legal personhood to natural entities. He is the author of Archiving Sovereignty: Law, History, Violence (2018) and the editor of Democracy’s Empire: Sovereignty, Law, and Violence (2007). Dr. Motha’s research explores the multiple forms and sources of legal norms (heteronomy) as a counter-narrative to liberal accounts of the autonomy of law. This includes challenging the opposition between life/non-life. He is the host of the podcast COUNTERSIGN and can be found on Twitter at @MothaStewart.