Juristic personhood for sacred natural sites: A potential means for protecting nature

Abstract

The recognition that 'other-than-human' persons can be legal subjects has previously been adopted in forms of customary law but has been denied in most modern jurisdictions until recently.The legal concept of juristic personhood is rooted in jus gentium of Imperial Rome, which was also the basis of 'public trusts'.Juristic personhood has been expanded in some jurisdictions to include other 'legal subjects' with specific rights and obligations.Judges in India, for example, have recognised enspirited idols as having legal status with the same legal rights as human beings ever since the nineteenth century.Recently, several additional jurisdictions have recognised certain spiritual-natural entities as legal persons, making sacred rivers and mountains 'juristic persons'.In this article we review a number of recent cases from around the world that highlight this evolution of jurisprudence over time.The legal regime of juristic personhood may be an effective tactic for safeguarding enspirited sacred natural sites, because it conceptually resonates with the animistic world-view and relational ontologies of many Indigenous peoples.Further study (and litigation) is required for such an approach to become widely recognised, but it could become an effective tool for conservation of nature within community-conserved areas and protected areas.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.