'The Legal Struggle For Rights of Nature in the United States' by Alexanmdra Valeria Huneeus in (2022) Wisconsin Law Review 133 comments
This Article analyzes the rise and persistence of the U.S.-based nature rights movement and its engagement with social movements in the Global South and with Indigenous ideas. The story told here of the U.S. nature rights movement is also significant because it reveals dynamics about the circulation of legal ideas across borders and legal traditions. Scholars have argued that, in the transnational flow of legal ideas, states in developing regions like Latin America act as sites of reception of transnational theories of law rather than sites of production. Legal actors based in the periphery have the role of receiving canonical theories, doctrine,and institutions of law developed in and for the North and adapting them to local experience and politics. The causes of this lopsided exchange are both material and cultural. Northern scholars have more funding and greater access to knowledge, as well as a greater ability to export their ideas. They also enjoy more prestige or symbolic capital. To counterbalance these dynamics, some scholars have promoted the idea of the South as an underutilized source of innovative intellectual production. This scholarship highlights ways in which ideas from the Global South can exert influence in the North and how Indigenous legal ideas can find expression in the national legal system and beyond—a process sometimes referred to as “interlegality in reverse.” Similarly, in scholarship on climate change in particular, the idea that the West can learn from Indigenous systems of knowledge has recently been given much weight.
This Article contributes to these debates. It shows a path by which legal ideas developed in the periphery can influence and nourish U.S. social movements and even local laws. Part I introduces the origins of the global rights of nature movement, with emphasis on several sources: U.S. Indian tribes; U.S. NGOs; and Latin American laws and social movements. Part II shows how the movement in the United States has persisted by shifting toward more aspirational and symbolic uses of law, by redefining itself as part of a transnational movement, and by turning toward engagement with Indigenous peoples and ideas. Part III presents the implications of this case study for our thinking about the symbolic use of law and about how legal ideas are deployed and travel—between the periphery and core and between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples—in a time of perceived environmental crisis.
Huneeus' 'The Canon of Nature Rights' in Choudhry, Hailbronner and Kumm (eds) Global Canons in an Age of Uncertainty: Debating Foundational Texts of Constitutional Democracy and Human Rights (Oxford University Press, forthcoming) comments
In constitutional as in human rights law, rights seek to define the relationship of the individual to government and society. The canonic texts of both fields of law emphasize themes such as individual autonomy against incursions by government, how governments can ensure a life with dignity, and meaningful individual participation in the democratic process. Their focus, in other words, is on the relations of humans among themselves. Even the rights of fictional entities such as corporations and nation states are ultimately rooted in claims of how humans can best conduct their relations with each other. The claim of rights of nature is a radical departure. It says that positive rights law can extend beyond relations among humans to encompass an entirely new domain of concern: human relations with those entities falling into the category of nature, or the non-human world.
This essay unfolds in four sections after the introduction. The first three sections discuss each rights of nature text respectively, arguing for its significance and using it to examine a distinct strand of argumentation for rights of nature claims. The final section examines the analytical tensions between and political interdependence of these three strands of rights of nature arguments, as well as their shifting relationship to the traditional tenets of constitutional democracy.
