Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
It was international news when New Zealand’s Parliament, in a 2017 settlement of Māori land claims, declared that the Whanganui River ‘is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person’. Such grants of nonhuman personhood seem peculiar. They contradict a conventional understanding that Western legal doctrine inscribes a sharp boundary between human owners of property and objects of that ownership, and only the owners have power. That anthropocentric view is part of what has made Anglo-American property law an instrument of violent dispossession and extraction. But it is not the only way to understand property doctrine. Drawing on philosophical critiques of modern Western anthropocentrism and the work of Indigenous scholars, this Article reads some familiar longstanding property doctrines to reflect a more holistic worldview. Recognizing that the legal line between persons and property has always been vanishingly thin might just show that ‘rights of nature’ grants are unlikely to significantly shift power. In a more optimistic view, grounding these novel grants in a durable widely accepted legal framework might help them move property law toward a more just, ethical, and sustainable system.

Jessie Allen, Property’s More-than-Human Personhood, 62 Houston Law Review 1 (2024).