Legal Personhood and Agency in the Age of the Rights of Nature

Extending legal personhood to natural entities has been one of the tools relied upon by numerous legislatures and courts across the globe in order to enhance their legal protection, while also creating a point of attribution for legal rights, such as property rights, rights to exist and flourish, and rights to be restored. These developments, as well as related discussions regarding the potential legal personhood of artificial intelligence, have led to a renewed interest in the concept in legal theory.

In the course of these developments one particular, influential, strand of literature argues for the exclusion of natural entities as potential legal persons on conceptual grounds. A leading proponent of this position, Visa Kurki, claims that natural entities such as rivers cannot be legal persons because incidents of legal personhood can only be attributed to entities that can hold claim-rights or perform acts. This paper will critically assess such claims by unpacking these conceptualizations of legal personhood and demonstrate that a conceptual exclusion of natural entities as legal persons is based on evaluative assumptions regarding the nature of claim rights, which do not warrant the conceptual exclusion. It will be argued instead that the attribution of legal personhood is a pure act of legal fiat that does not require to take such evaluative assumptions on board. Where such evaluative assumptions become relevant is rather at the point of justifying which entities should be legal persons, and that is why some normative justifications for extending legal personhood and rights to natural entities will be provided consecutively. Finally, this paper will address the 'elephant in the room' resulting from discussions on the nature of legal personhood, namely the fact that natural entities cannot act in the law and thus need to have their interests translated by means of legal and political representation.