Abstract
Can nature or natural objects hold rights or be legal persons? Accounts arguing for the legal personhood of natural objects often rely on what is termed the Anything-Goes Approach: more or less any entity can be a legal person, if the legislator or some other appropriate legal actor declares the entity a legal person. The article scrutinizes two arguments that are used to justify the Anything-Goes Approach. According to the Deference Argument, it is up to the legal authorities to determine which entities can be legal persons. Therefore, more or less anything can be a legal person. According to the Corporate Argument, if the law can treat entities like corporations as legal persons, then surely it can treat virtually any entity as a legal person. The article argues that neither of these arguments work, and that natural objects in fact likely cannot be legal persons. Instead, legal arrangements purporting to extend legal personhood to natural objects should be analyzed, for instance, as foundations with collective beneficiaries.
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