The Rights of Nature concept not only breaks with the anthropocentrism of existing (environmental) law; it also recognizes that nature has private interests, in addition to being of public interest. That is, whereas in classic sustainability thinking, the use of certain resources is allowed as long as public interests are not systematically/systemically harmed, rights of nature facilitate the protection of nature before planetary boundaries are transgressed. This recognition of nature as having private interests enables the framing of disagreements around ‘nature’ as matters of corrective justice, which renders the application of private legal doctrines more easily conceivable and arguably even necessary.

The contributions to this Symposium Collection showcase the viability of the intersection of private law and rights of nature. Firstly, it is necessary to research how existing private law will influence the effectiveness of rights of nature. Such an exercise is undertaken by Björn Hoops, who carefully assesses what rights for the German Black Forest would mean in terms of German constitutional property law. The mirror image of this approach is to explore what impact Rights of Nature will have on private law. Such an approach is taken by Alex Putzer and co-authors in their article on the transformation of land-ownership regimes after the introduction of Rights of Nature in Ecuador and Uganda. A third line of scholarship assesses the significance of Rights of Nature for private law theory: Visa Kurki proposes a new concept of legal personhood, prompting us to think through the meaning of statements like ‘a river is a legal person’.

Ownership has been a key tool in the exploitation of nature for centuries. However, ownership could also shield natural entities from extraction and pollution if it were vested in them, rather than in humans or corporations. Through a case study of German constitutional property law, this article examines the normative content of this constitutional right. It argues that in owning themselves, natural entities would have numerous tools to fend off human interference with their self-determination. Constitutional property law would require any harmful activity affecting the natural entity to be based upon legislation and necessary to achieve a public purpose. The natural entity would enjoy broader access to justice. Courts would also often award appropriate remedies; where the natural entity would be awarded only compensation, this would be unsatisfactory because money cannot replace nature. The article finds that constitutional property law offers the potential for further protection from human interference, which has not been realized because of anthropocentric value judgments prevalent in German legal doctrine. Ecocentric approaches to ownership and invalidity as a standard remedy would play an important role in unlocking the full potential of ownership for environmental protection.

Despite the growing prominence and use of Rights of Nature (RoN), doubts remain as to their tangible effect on environmental protection efforts. By analyzing two initiatives in post-colonial societies, we argue that they do influence the creation of institutionalized bridges between differing land-ownership regimes. Applying the methodology of inter-legality, we examine the Ecuadorian Constitution of 2008 and the Ugandan National Environment Act 2019. We identify five normative spheres that influence land-ownership regimes. We find that the established Ecuadorian RoN have an institutionalized effect on the nation's legal system. Their more recently established Ugandan counterpart shows potential to develop in the same direction.

The Rights of Nature movement has recently achieved significant successes in using legal personhood as a tool for environmental protection. Perhaps most famously, the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand was accorded legal personhood in 2017. These kinds of development have attracted plenty of scholarly interest, but few have scrutinized a foundational underlying question: Can natural areas, such as rivers, or other non-sentient natural entities actually be legal persons?

The case of the Whanganui River is an example of the direct legal personhood model: it purports to grant legal rights to the river directly. Some other jurisdictions have set up legal persons to administer rivers, without declaring the rivers themselves to be legal persons: the indirect legal personhood model. This article offers legal-philosophical arguments for why legal personhood cannot be attributed to rivers directly.

Normally, legal persons can hold claim-rights and be legally wronged. Some legal persons, such as human adults, can also be held legally responsible and exercise legal competences by entering into contracts. Natural entities cannot do any of these things. Hence, they cannot be legal persons directly; rather, their putative direct legal personhood will collapse into indirect legal personhood. Hence, treating natural entities as direct legal persons amounts only to a legal fiction. Such fictions may be justified for symbolic reasons. However, if environmental protection requires setting up a legal person to protect a natural entity, such protection in most cases can be realized without claiming that the natural entity itself would have become a legal person.

At first blush, normative arguments justifying representation of future generations and nature appear to rest on contradictory values. This article argues, however, that there are strong synergies between these discourses. Arguments for institutions for future generations based on human rights are compared with justifications for proxy representation of nature based on ecological justice, Indigenous ecological justice and socio-ecological justice. Case studies involving the Welsh Commissioner for Future Generations, the Aotearoa New Zealand Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, and ascribing legal personality to rivers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, are presented to demonstrate that representing future generations and nature reflect mutually supporting values. Building on these synergies is vital for reform efforts.

It is sometimes assumed that, in order for animals to be adequately protected by the legal system, their status first needs to change from property to person in one fell swoop. Legal personhood is perceived as the necessary requirement for animals to possess legal rights and become visible in law, distinguished from legal things. In this article I propose an alternative approach to animal legal personhood, which construes the road towards it as a gradual transition rather than a revolution. According to this alternative approach, animals become increasingly visible in law when their existing simple rights are shaped to function more like the rights of humans. Instead of a condition for the possession of rights, legal personhood should then be regarded as a (potential) consequence of growing animal rights.

This article argues that banks should adopt animal welfare policies in the light of the growing acceptance of the need for ‘responsible banking’, which incorporates environmental, social, and governance analysis into credit risk and due diligence processes. The responsibility of banks for animal welfare is underscored by the drive towards greater investment in animal agribusiness, and the vicious cycle through which animal agribusiness can both contribute to, and be impacted by, climate disruption. The article evaluates, through a desktop review, how leading Australian retail banks and agribusiness lenders are addressing animal welfare and climate disruption in animal agribusiness lending. We find that although most banks have made a commitment to animal welfare and climate policies, these often amount to little more than greenwashing. We call for an ecosystem of industry, regulatory, and civil society action to address this danger.

This article addresses the impacts of the carding system (green, yellow, red) of the European Union (EU) Regulation on illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing on the fisheries laws of third countries. Specifically, it analyzes Thailand's national legal reforms, which followed interactions between the EU and Thailand during the yellow card period. Building on past research on the EU's use of market power to exert regulatory influence on third countries, the article explores other factors that might encourage third countries to engage in national regulatory reforms: the EU's powers of expertise, monitoring, and agenda-setting. Finally, the article also considers the legitimacy of the EU's regulatory power over third countries.

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) are crucial in promoting economic growth through their project finance activities. Meanwhile, to address negative effects arising from their development projects, MDBs increasingly have focused their attention on the environmental and social impacts of their supported projects in recent decades. This article analyzes the relationship between the Environmental and Social Framework (ESF) adopted by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). It argues that better compliance with MEAs by the AIIB and its borrowers in implementing AIIB-supported development projects will be achieved only if its independent accountability mechanism (IAM) can actively examine project compliance with the ESF in the light of MEAs. The AIIB has an opportunity to provide leadership in promoting the fulfilment of MEA obligations in development finance. However, this is contingent on ensuring effective oversight by its newly established IAM moving forward.