Compare with what personhood has done for corporations - classing political donations as "free speech" has been an avenue for them to get around limits intended to make it harder to buy politicians.
We speak metaphorically about how corporations rape the land. Can this river now sue corporations who dump garbage into it for raping it? Probably not if there's a legal definition of what "rape" is. But maybe charges of "assault" are possible.
The article notes that which rights a body of water has have yet to be determined. That's going to be some interesting times.
And I am saying this as someone in the middle of moving to New Orleans, a place humanity has been fighting with a river over for three centuries now. Someday the Mississippi will assert its claim forcefully. And New Orleanians will probably just shrug and either build up houses that sit next to canals instead of streets, or learn to grow gills. New Venice or New Atlantis.
It'd be a nice change from activist judges who take the side of the corporations.
People have sued God (and lost): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawsuits_against_God
People have sued search warrants (and won): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_v._Search_Warrant
So you probably can! But, lacking a fixed address or any way to notify the defendant, you'd probably have the case thrown out. Also, enforcing any judgement would probably be impossible, so there's that.
The moral of the story is that courts have lots of ways to deal with situations like this.
That, or it's a clever hack that that brings many existing aspects of the legal system to bear in interesting ways.
For example, I'm guessing that the river being a legal person would imply that it cannot be owned, neither in whole nor in part, by any other person. It sounds like the law also provides for some other things that legal persons typically have, such as a panel of one or more humans to serve as its representative. And that panel of humans would probably then have the ability to do things like pursue litigation on its behalf.
Note that this isn't a particularly new hack, either. Basically the same thing has been done with things that are even more nebulous than a river, such as trusts and corporations, for centuries. The most unprecedented aspect is the idea that you could use this bit of semantic sleight-of-hand for a purpose other than making money.
Children have rights, though those rights pretty much all have to be modulated through someone who is either their parent or acting as their parent.
Children can't march into court and demand justice when they are harmed, but you can 1) sue on behalf of a child, 2) take a child into the care of the state and 3) prosecute someone who harms the child. They're legal people, though all of their rights are contingent on other people acting within the legal system to enforce them.
Giving a corporation personhood does not give the corporation rights as much as does take away rights from those who interact with that corporation.
Maybe, but the purpose of legal personhood for abstract entities is also to hold them accountable under the same proven body of law that applies to individuals. Corporate personhood is not a new invention, but came from Roman law as it became practically necessary to extend the body of law governing individuals to families, clans, tribes, and eventually to such entities as guilds, universities and even city states. Today, the word 'corporation' has become virtually synonymous with a commercial enterprise, but the concept of legal incorporation is much wider than that.
I think you are (aside from any debate about your basic position) conflating juridical personhood, which is the issue here, with Constitutional (under, e.g., the 5th and 14th Amendments, and thus applying to rights within the scope of liberty addressed by those Amendments) personhood, as at issue in Citizens United, which are different concepts.
Juridical personhood is a defining feature of corporations, making them subjects of law that can, for instance, be sued.
One problem that corporate personhood was meant to solve was that owning part of a business becomes a legally risky thing when the business isn't a separate person from its owners. Incorporation creates a legal firewall that, for example, allows me to own stock in Apple without having to fear that I will get personally sued if they do something wrong, or that someone will be able to go after my personal assets if they go bankrupt.
It also makes it easier for me to interact with the corporation in certain ways - for example, if I have a grievance against something Apple did, I can name a single, easy to identify entity in my lawsuit, rather than having to pursue a case against a whole slew of individuals. The latter would be a prohibitively difficult effort, since you'd have to figure out exactly which individual are responsible in order to name them in the lawsuit, and then deal with a whole bunch of additional litigation in order to allocate liability among all the people involved in whatever thing it is you're suing them about.
There is still a question of exactly what rights and responsibilities a corporate person should get. Many legal jurisdictions, including the United States, have historically been very liberal in granting natural rights to corporations, and there's plenty of room to argue that they've gone too far. But I don't think there's much room for arguing against the idea that at least some aspects of corporate personhood actually work out to the benefit of people who interact with corporations.
This is part of what I mean when I say that corporate personhood takes away rights from those who interact with corporations. A corporation can feel financial pain, but it cannot experience the emotional pain of loss, the fear of which being a deterrent against tortious (or criminal) behavior.
I realize, the notion of personally punishing e.g., XYZ Phone Co shareholders, because one their phone's battery bursts into flames and kills a child, sounds a little weird. Should the mother of this child simply accept cash for her son's life and be happy with it? If that's not fair, who should personally pay, the CEO? He's just an employee of the corporation, who is beholden to the shareholders.
> The idea that corporations have legal rights, and therefore a kind of personhood, is not an invention of contemporary conservatives. Its roots stretch all the way back through the history of American law and deep into the English common-law tradition. That tradition was captured most comprehensively — and communicated to the American founders most forcefully — by William Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England...
> A corporation is simply a legally recognized group of people cooperating with a view to some common end. Indeed, the very purpose of that legal recognition and the rights that accompany it is to provide a framework for a group of citizens to freely associate with one another in a stable, productive, and harmonious way.
https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/are-corp...
It's no different from the legal fiction that says “the United State of America” is a person, either.
The Maori, under the Treaty of Waitangi, own the rivers, and the Crown (NZ Government) stole that right away from them. (This is all in the article). The river's personhood is a compromise between the status quo and giving the land back.
(and it's a marvellous region and river, that deserves to be left alone)
[1] See, e.g., Lawrence B. Solum, Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences, 70 North Carolina Law Review 1231, 1239 (1992) (https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...)
The law was recommended by the Waitangi tribunal which is a body that redresses historical grievances by Iwi.
Not only is the river now it's own entity which is not owned by anyone local Iwi received $80 million from the government and a $30 million dollar fund to improve the health of the river.
(I'm well aware that New Zealand is a different country, so it doesn't set a legal precedent. It does set a cultural and moral one, however.)
That the river is valued for the fish and plants is a human construct.
Philosophers have debated questions like this for years, and have far more powerful arguments (on both sides) than I do. I suggest you look them up if you are really interested.
I have concluded that slavery should be legal, but there is a catch: all slaves must agree to become a slave while in their right mind. I can't imagine someone agreeing to become a slave, but if someone does I don't have a problem with it. (Note that depression, drunkenness, children, and kidnapping are some of the more obvious ways to get a slave that I have ruled out)
If I dump waste in the river, the river or its creatures aren't going to march into court and demand justice, people will. They will say they are acting on behalf of the interests of the river, its ecosystem, or its living things, but rivers are unthinking geographical features and the animals aren't choosing these advocates.
You don't need to engage in such theatrics to protect the environment.