The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person
nationalgeographic.com
nationalgeographic.com
What a great article, thanks for sharing!
If it is a legal person then I know quite a few people who would like the Whanganui River to be held accountable for its actions in the destruction of personal property. Haha.
About 20km up the River is a wool shed I’ve been visiting since 2011.
On it is a marker of the highest known modern flooding level.
It was shockingly high.
Since that time there has been 2 major bouts of river flooding.
The most recent was metres above the last record high(above wool shed roofline).
That river is bipolar.
Absolutely beautiful and deceptively dangerous.
The Whanganui River is like an old girlfriend who will always have my heart, but it’s best we spent most of our time apart.
It changes literally right before your eyes.
Riverside erosion in real time, and rain upriver can raise the river height and speed faster than any other river I have spent time on.
It’s like nature on time lapse.
A good friend and mentor is on the local Iwi(Maori Tribe) governance board.
The best part is there is no mobile phone connectivity up the river.
Only hardline or satphone.
I grew up in Whanganui.
You must be pretty far up to run out of cell service. I had service all the way up to the bridge to no where last time I was up that way.
It is weird to see the river or as my dad would say awa in hacker news.
I’m South Island based, but up there twice a year for the last 8 years.
We lose mobile coverage once we are descending on the north side of the hill heading up the river from town.
We stay at a farm and Marae owned by the local river people iwi.
We hang out between there and Jeresulem further north.
Hope your family and friends did ok in the floods.
Pretty crazy seeing it here, already shared it and the river folks I’ve been able to reach are really chuffed with the article.
We were told that the Māori considered the river to be a person and as a sign of respect we should not wash ourselves in it. Aside from that, it did not effect our trip.
If anyone is interested, there's more information here - https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/ma...
It is a different world once you go over the Whanganui River Road hill.
Think of it more as you have a top-level protocol in a piece of software. It's super flexible, designed for many diverse use cases. You write a whole pile of software around the top-level protocol "Person". Then, you realize you need to extend the software to support a new kind of thing, the "River". You now have a few choices.
Option 1: Massive refactor. Create a new top-level thing called "LegalEntity" to which both "Person" and "River" conform. Then, you have to update literally every single thing in the entire app to support both, and handle both appropriately.
Option 2: There's enough flexibility in "Person" than you can just make "River" conform to "Person" and you don't have to refactor anything at all.
The rights between a human, a corporation and a river might be different, but the fact that they all have rights is what unites them and why they are "persons". I believe it is a legacy when only human beings had rights. But the legal system got abstracted and we wanted to give rights to non-human entities.
Also, keep in mind that human beings had different rights as well. Some humans didn't even have rights and were not considered legal persons.
Colloquially, we use person as a synonym for human, but in law, person is anything with rights.
I would guess that the issue here is some mix of your not understanding the legal nuance here (as you allude to) and the law around it itself being incoherent. I don't claim to understand the laws here myself, but then the legal concept of a person is very tortured anyway.
Person vs Property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...
It's the category of things that have legally cognizable interests, which is arguably the most important category for law.
It's named “persons” because persons in the boring common sense were originally the only members of he category.
It works, and wise people don’t seek to fix things that are not actually broken.
In the US a certain set of rights are given to "persons" that should really be given to "legal entities", I've never had a conclusive answer as to why but I'm just going to guess it was a lack of foresight. Over time there have been judicial rulings, national laws, local laws, and other fun stuff that have slowly corrected or clarified the definition of a legal "person" that should apply to all things labeled "persons". Some of these you may or may not agree with (maybe only "natural persons" should be able to participate in the political system and such) but the general approach of clarifying the term even if the term isn't perfect is a pretty good approach.
That this meaning is unknown to people outside the profession is not necessarily an issue. It is the job of a good legal professional to make sure we never need know whilst they sort the minutiae between themselves.
We don't expect scientists to restrict their terminologies within their own fields to terms with which laypeople are familiar, equally so for those of us in computer science and engineering, so why expect it of another field?
The high priesthood preserved Latin, it's true, concealing the true nature of the religion from the tongue of its faithful parishioners in order to maintain unearned control; this is not the case for Law English as lawyers and judges have nothing to gain by maintaining their own manner of speaking since their pronouncements and judges do need to be explained, in plain English, to the involved parties and the public who have no need of the knowledge of legal minutiae. These 'translations' are relatively easily scrutinised even by non-professionals and a public that is increasingly literate in the law.
PERSON = "any entity that has the moral right of self-determination."
http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/what_is_a_person/what_i...
so can a confinable area of nature like a river, a mountain, a planet etc. be such an entity with those rights? Who grants those rights? How is self-determination recognized?
For humans the latter is leading to the free will debate, see e.g. here for a start https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy/Wha...
so in essence, if a significant amount of humans agree, that the criteria for self-determination are not only the strict ones expressed by humans, why should a natural entity not be treated like a person?
edit: the initial reaction so far has been: it can not stand up in court so it cannot be a LEGAL person. So one could challenge: a company can as well not speak in court. The only ones speaking in court are representatives that got somehow chosen. Why could the same not be applied to the person in discussion here?
> an individual, company, or other entity which has legal rights and is subject to obligations.
The obvious answer here is "ok, they're all persons, and as soon as they can stand up in court and tell us what they want, we'll listen to them".
- What is the date of birth and gender of this "legal person"?
- Is it a New Zealand citizen?
- How will the river enroll to vote? How will the river pay it's fines when it fails to vote?
- What will happen when the river breaks its banks and destroys property, and someone sues it for damages? Will it be in contempt of court for not showing up to appearances?
- If New Zealand enters a major war, can the river be drafted for military service? How do you fine or imprison a river for draft dodging?
- Where the river releases it's fluids at the beach, is it engaging in public urination?
- If a policeman issues it with a lawful order, and it fails to comply, can it be arrested?
The reason corporations are called "corporations" is that they are "incorporated" which is a legal term meaning the creation of a legal person.
No, it's a different term that is spelled and pronounced the same (that is, it's a different legal sense of “person”, which courts have found corporations to qualify for for completely different reasons.)
I’m sure Donald Trump would love it if the answer was “no.”
Doesn't this same protection apply to the author of an advertisement published by a super PAC?
Someone working for a super PAC how ever isnt spending his own money.
US law had always interpreted media companies as having the freedom of the press (but not necessarily freedom of speech).
Corporations may or may not have freedom of speech. But it would be bizarre if a media company didn’t have freedom of the press.
This book is interesting on the subject: https://amzn.to/2XxbbSX
reviewed here in The Economist: https://www.economist.com/business/2011/01/27/the-crescent-a...
If corporations cannot get those benefits, how will we as a society get any benefit from people working together for something complex? You cannot make a workable spaceship, car engine (a car might be possible once you have an engine that meets emissions, and several other complex parts). Our modern world is mostly designed around retirement plans owning corporations - without some legal shield 3/4ths of the US should go to prison for Enron
Will it be a few rich people who enter into all those contracts and pay their people? At what point do the rich refuse because they have too many people signing contracts on their behalf that they dare not take the risk?
There could well be other solutions to the problem. It could be that some alternative is a "better" compromise. However it is not easy to come up with something that doesn't have flaws that are worse than what we have.
So for example, with Citizens United, there's no restriction on individuals that make up the company from making political donations from their own personal funds - including those that they earn as owners or employees of said company. But the company cannot use the funds that it owns as an entity in its own right for the same purpose. If its owners want to use those funds for that purpose, they can have the company pay it to them as dividends (taxed accordingly), and then spend them as they see fit - with their own name attached to any such use.
Note that this effectively protects free speech qua speech even for corporations, because there's ultimately always a person speaking.
Then they would just not exist: a corporation is exactly a grant of legal personhood.
Governmental organizations are also incorporated persons, including governments themselves (otherwise you wouldn't be able to sue the United States).
Non-corporate entities like nonprofits, partnerships, cooperatives, educational institutions, etc are also legal persons, and need to be for the same reasons.
Also in the U.S., the controversy about corporations being persons has to do with selectively granting them constitutional rights, not about their identity as human beings.
A party is a person who is a litigant in a lawsuit, to be a party, one must first be a legal person.
> Also in the U.S., the controversy about corporations being persons has to do with selectively granting them constitutional rights,
That's actually a controversy about a different kind of personhood than is being discussed (that is whether they are within the scope of “person” in the sense used in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment, which has been addressed not in terms of juridical personhood but in terms of the necessity of such to give effect to rights of natural persons acting through the corporation.)
Wouldn't that simply be three persons?
If you give legal status to rivers -- or trees, or whales -- what you're really doing is giving legal standing to someone who claims to be acting on their behalf. Who gets to decide who represents these persons?
This does not necessarily follow.
But even with the benefit of all that law we still have many courtroom arguments over who gets to decide what is best for individuals who are only partially able to speak for themselves. When we move beyond natural persons and corporations, we have far less jurisprudence to rely upon and they can't express their desires at all, so it's harder on both counts.
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.
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.
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 you or anyone want to make sure we know about a problem title, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is best. We don't come close to reading all the posts here.
"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html