I Am the Magpie River: How a Quebec river became a person under local law
cbc.ca
cbc.ca
The Canadian legal system has made no such recognition.
Municipal government making a law outside of their authority has the same effect as if you or i declared a law.
(Or more specificly, the constitution doesn't mention municipal governments so they dont have instrinsic rights, and all their powers come from the laws creating them. They definitely do not have the power to issue letters patent or anything of the sort)
Whether or not anyone else is willing to go along with it is another matter. Making a law does not automatically compel others to accept it as their law. Indeed, those who believe in the French civil law system, which describes the majority of Quebec residents, are not likely to accept laws that are made outside of that framework.
But they might. The only thing that would try to stop it is other people, but if those other people are also on board then anything is possible.
Indeed, Quebec tradition ensures that most people will choose to recognize the laws crafted under the given framework and not beyond. But they can also choose to look beyond it if they so wish. Of course, they don't have to either.
I encourage you to watch Fargo Season 5 which just finished. The bad guy is basically just that, the sheriff of a small town that doesn't recognize the authority of the U.S. federal government.
What do think will happen? The answer is nothing, because ain't nobody taking this law declaring Magpie a person seriously. You can create all the laws you want, but they don't mean anything if nobody else is willing to recognize them. Government isn't something off to the side. It's just the people.
We're the remenant of the british empire. The law is not the people. The law flows from the King & parliment, not some we the people BS.
Ultimately laws are enforced by people with guns. You can try to look beyond a bullet from a gun, but that usually doesn't go well.
> In the case of damage, due to flooding for instance, Cárdenas explains that the Magpie would likely not be found liable. "The river doesn't commit intentional damage, therefore it cannot be sued," she said, pointing out that those who build in known flood zones are also aware of the risks.
Intent is not a condition for successfully suing someone but realistically this entire thing is mostly a joke anyway so might as well make up the entire thing as they go.
An excerpt:
> The Clamzorians are animists. They believe every rock and tree and river has its own spirit. And those spirits are legal people. This on its own is not unusual – even New Zealand gives rivers legal personhood. But in Clamzoria, if a flood destroys your home, you sue the river.
Because corporations are persons with constitutional rights under US law, if there is a slippery slope this is not where it starts.
Animal rights are one of two important philosophical movements from the second half of the 20th century. Copy-left is the other (and the easier one).
Such an entity would have the same "legal personhood" rights, and its leadership / officers would do pretty much the same thing as the "guardians" discussed in the article. And it avoids all the goofy questions of whether the river itself can be guilty of strict-liability offenses or liable for flooding damage or whatever.
Instead I have some training in philosophy. It gives me some experience with slippery slope arguments, the philosophical rationales for animal rights, and some other equally useful (or useless) ideas.
But insofar as I understand the common law, persons are strictly liable for matters of strict liability and “being guilty” would require a criminal act (e.g. criminal negligence).
But again, hire a lawyer if it matters etc.
The problematic part here is, how do you determine what a river "wants". Maybe it wants to be polluted the way some humans want to smoke. Ok, maybe not, but still, it seems like this is the wrong tool for the job. Why not just use some sort of environmental easement, or pass some law making it a protected river.
It’s a slippery slope to a national park system. It’s also a slippery slope to a public-private partnership to maintain natural sites.
Both are great.
It’s also a slippery slope to a system where natural entities receives court appointed “guardians”, who sue and defend based in the interests of their client, whatever that means.
That would be a mess.
There really needs to be some sort of board, selected by parties with interests in the well-being of the river.
Or just a regular old national park.
Companies, charities, and governments are all legal persons.
I could form an LLC and that would be a person.
There’s nothing about legal personhood that implies a right to continues existence.
It might make sense for certain natural entities to posses legal personhood.
It would probably make for sense for there to be some kind of public interest real-estate trust.
Maybe i'm missing something, but surely this would require an act of either the provincial or federal legislature. Surely this is way outside of the powers of a municipal council.
My first attempt sounded too much like "u-can-eat-shit" to be correct...I hope...
Silent T’s apparently.
Instead of contorting language and law into pretzels, make new law to conserve nature.
A river is not a person. A corporation is not a person.
Which raises the question, should a collection of people have different rights than the members of said collection?
A person can hold up a sign, but can two people hold up a sign together.
It's complicated and difficult to draw the lines and impossible to do it perfectly. But if Elon Musk wants to blow an entire fortune for the lulz, that's kind of up to him. And we shouldn't stop him.
Ah, but you'll say, the law should recognize a distinction between humans and corporations! It does. Corporate personhood is nothing more than a way of talking about the rights, privileges, and obligations, which corporations share with humans. When push comes to shove, the fiction is dispensed with, this is called "piercing the corporate veil"[0], terminology which shows that this is understood to be reasoning by analogy.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piercing_the_corporate_veil
Rivers being people is silly though.
Imagine if, say, the New York Times Coporation wasn’t a person.
It couldn’t own property. Or enter into contracts. So no office building, unless one of the investors had a property they cared to rent to individual officers or employees.
Coworking for everybody, basically.
Salaries would be paid from the private accounts of individual investors. As would all expenses.
If an investor ran low on funds, they would have to be replaced, quickly.
All employees would be the personal servants of the executive officer, although their contracts would make clear they must serve the organization as a whole.
Some industries can function like this.
Maritime insurance functioned without incorporation for centuries.
Even today Lloyd’s of London has some “names” which are personally liable, with no corporate veil between themselves and liability.
But businesses like the New York Times Corporation can’t operate that way.