Nature as a sentient being: Can rivers be legal persons?

Abstract

The concept of ‘legal personhood and rights of rivers’ has developed as an alternative to anthropocentric legal frameworks that focus only on the instrumental values of rivers. Obtaining legal personhood marks a key milestone in legal recognition that could provide for the protection of rivers for more than the instrumental values that they hold. However, who could be considered legal persons is the subject of widespread debate in Western jurisprudence. Legalists hold that anything and anyone can be a legal person while Realists believe that a legal person is defined by certain attributes held only by certain categories of persons. One of the main arguments against the personhood of rivers raised by Realists is that rivers are not sentient beings and, consequently, they are incapable of holding the status of a legal person. The idea that nature is not a sentient being is mainly a Western construct. This research analyses the theory of legal personhood to determine whether rivers can and should be legal persons. It challenges the Realist claim that rivers cannot be legal persons because they lack sentience, drawing on Indigenous Vedda ontologies in Sri Lanka and Aboriginal worldviews from the continent now called Australia. The authors argue that a pluralistic approach to legal personhood is crucial in recognising and valuing our hyperconnected world, preventing categorisation, homogenisation and colonisation of ontologies and addressing sustainability challenges surrounding rivers. The research contributes to the existing scholarly work by defending the concept of legal personhood for rivers within a more pluralistic legal philosophy and addressing one of its major criticisms.