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Does Nature Need Rights?

Lael K Weis, Robert Mullins

Oxford Journal of Legal Studies

|December 11, 2025

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

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Rights of Nature (RoN) laws offer a green alternative but face challenges. An ecocentric governance paradigm, emphasizing duties and community membership over rights and legal personhood, is proposed as a more effective approach.

Area of Science:

Environmental Law
Legal Theory
Political Ecology

Background:

Anthropocentric environmental rights frameworks are increasingly critiqued.
Rights of Nature (RoN) presents a potential alternative to traditional environmental legal structures.
Transformative green constitutionalism seeks fundamental ecological reform.

Purpose of the Study:

To critically examine the juridical dimensions of Rights of Nature (RoN) laws.
To assess the suitability of RoN for transformative green constitutionalist goals.
To propose an alternative to the dominant rights-based paradigm in RoN.

Main Methods:

Analysis of empirical studies on RoN legislation.
Examination of the redeployment of liberal legal concepts ('rights', 'legal personality') for ecological purposes.

Keywords:

ecocentric duties ecocentrism environmental constitutionalism green constitutionalism non-anthropocentric constitutionalism rights of nature

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Theoretical critique of the rights-based paradigm in environmental law.

Main Results:

RoN laws face challenges when adapting liberal concepts like 'rights' and 'legal personality' for ecological well-being.
The dominant paradigm of RoN, focusing on nature as a rights-bearing subject, is deemed insufficient.
An alternative 'governance paradigm' is identified as more promising for ecocentric legal frameworks.

Conclusions:

The green potential of RoN is better realized through reconfiguring authority relations, not solely through rights-based approaches.
Ecocentric legal frameworks should prioritize ecocentric values and duties over rights.
Ecological community membership offers a more suitable alternative to legal personhood for nature.