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I spend a LOT of time on the Whanganui River.
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.
Good to see another kiwi on here.
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.
Absolutely!
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.
I canoed down the Whanganui over Christmas a couple of years ago. It's one of New Zealand's 'Great Walks' with huts to stay in along the way.
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...
I hope you enjoyed it!
It is a different world once you go over the Whanganui River Road hill.
Legal personhood is much misunderstood. There is no grand set of rights attached to all persons. There are an infinite different types of persons, entities to which some rights are attached but never all. We in the west normally understand "persons" as in flesh-and-blood physical people but even then what rights a person has depends on all sorts of things, from the location of their birth, to their age, sex, mental capacity, education or wealth. And yes, race can still alter a person's rights under the law. What matters is not the "person" label but what rights this court is willing to recognize at attach to this new type of person.
Why call them persons then, when they clearly aren't, and their rights are so different that same right can be fundamental for one type or entity but completely irrelevant to another (e.g. right to life, in the context of legal entities). Basically, what's the benefit of having this single category where everything gets lumped?
I'm assuming it's a pragmatic decision. Rather than creating a new class of thing ('rivers'? 'natural entities'?) and then revisiting the entire code of laws and updating it to apply to 'persons' and 'natural entities' where applicable, they made the pragmatic decision of leveraging the flexibility of the existing construct. A "legal person" is not a "human person" its a specific construct.
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.
I forgot where I learned this, but I remember someone saying that in law there are really just two entities - person and property. A person is any entity that has rights. Only "persons" can have rights in law. A property is anything that can be owned. And all law is revolved around person and property.
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.
> Basically, what's the benefit of having this single category where everything gets lumped?
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.
Convenience before the courts. Tradition thereafter. Inertia in the body of Law at some point.
It works, and wise people don’t seek to fix things that are not actually broken.
They are persons for historical reason, it's just like that table at the center of your DB with a terrible name - changing it now would be immensely expensive due to all the dependencies so we just accept the table is poorly named.
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.
Because law English is not our English. Law uses plenty of terms in completely different ways than everyday and even academic English, but still with specific meaning within its own context.
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.
Here's a link to the paper mentioned at the end of the article; "Should Trees Have Standing?" by Christopher Stone - https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-christop...
I find this philosophical debate very fascinating.
What actually is a person? e.g. one definition claims
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?
Not "person", but "legal person":
> an individual, company, or other entity which has legal rights and is subject to obligations.
why should a natural entity not be treated like a person?
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".
To which the obvious counterpoint is "ok, so mentally incapacitated people shouldn't have rights because they can't articulate them?"
We have well established systems in law for persons without capacity to either represent themselves or even designate a representative to have their legal interests represented, because this happens with existing legal persons (even natural persons) with some regularity.
This is the second place in Aotearoa New Zealand to be given this status, the first being Te Urewera. The NZ government grants these rights due to their Tapu for the Maori people.
It seems to be having a positive impact on pollution, I wonder if similar could be done for other rivers. For those who don't know many New Zealand rivers are toxic cesspits thanks to years of intensive dairy farming. It's something that successive governments seem unwilling to act on thanks to lobbying from the dairy industry.
Wasn’t there a river in the US who was going to get this too?
This is beyond stupid. A lot of practical questions were not answered in the article…
- 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?
Better them than corporations.
This is a misunderstanding of what "person" means in law. It is not synonymous with "human being". It means a legal entity that can own things and have responsibilities. If corporations are not persons, then they cannot own property, they cannot sue, they cannot be sued, they cannot enter contracts, etc etc etc.
The reason corporations are called "corporations" is that they are "incorporated" which is a legal term meaning the creation of a legal person.
Legally, you may be right. However, this same term is used politically to give corporations the right to free speech, and hence to make campaign donations, which is ridiculous.
Now that would be an interesting system, if corporations were deprived of the benefits of legal personhood.
Whose law? In the U.S. there's a term called "party" for whoever's suing or being sued. It can be a person or a combination of parties. Three people can be sued without collectively being a human being.
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.
Corporations have the advantage that it's clear who speaks in their behalf.
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?
> what you're really doing is giving legal standing to someone who claims to be acting on their behalf
This does not necessarily follow.
Who speaks on the behalf of the mentally handicapped, and children without parents? Are they people?
Iwi.
This is philosophical drivel that has only the effect of making politicians seem like they care about the environment. The notions of harm or injustice with respect to the environment are all socially constructed human values we imbue them with.
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.
The river now has a lot of rights that it previously did not. This will create a lot of really interesting legal possibilities.
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.
If I own a house adjacent to the river, and the river floods my property, can I sue the river?
> This is philosophical drivel that has only the effect of making politicians seem like they care about the environment.
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.
Legal fictions that carry the force of law are very distinctly not legal drivel.
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.
Sometimes it takes theatrics to get people to care enough about a resource, especially when it is a commons.
On the other hand, is it any different than the legal fiction in the US that says that Google and Microsoft are "people" themselves rather than businesses that employ people?
This was about Maori settlements, not politicians.
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)
It's also an acknowledgement that the anglo-saxon way of law is not the only way.
democracy started also as a quite philosophical debate back in those days...
Beats nothing.
If I dump "waste" in the river I will argue on behalf of the river in court that the fish are invaders and my "waste" is an antibiotic killing those invaders. It is just as valid as anything else.
That the river is valued for the fish and plants is a human construct.
Title is incorrect. It is a Maori River, not The Maori River being talked about here. It is The Whanganui River. National Geographic's title is also confusing, but not outright incorrect as posted here.
Thanks, we've corrected that.
It makes one wonder why people feel the need to editorialise titles at all. In plenty of subreddits, for instance, the practice is banned.