Trees Can't Sue (Yet): Impediments to Rights of Nature in Anglo-American Juridical Systems

Abstract

This paper examines how Lockean concepts of private property fundamentally impede the integration of Rights of Nature (RoN) within Anglo-American legal systems. Despite mounting ecological crises and the inadequacy of conventional environmental governance frameworks, attempts to grant legal personhood to natural entities remain constrained by Lockean anthropocentric legal traditions that conceptualise nature primarily as property.

Through critical analysis of legal pluralism and evolving personhood conceptualisations, the research highlights structural barriers to meaningful ecological protection. Case studies — including New Zealand's Whanganui River and India's Ganges and Yamuna Rivers — reveal a paradoxical pattern: initiatives celebrated as ecocentric innovations often reproduce the very anthropocentric hierarchies they aim to challenge. Through critical analysis of legal personhood, this paper identifies some key impediments: the subject/object dichotomy that is embedded in Anglo-American jurisprudence, jurisdictional fragmentation that fails to accommodate the transboundary nature of ecological systems as well as fundamental rights clashes between newly recognised natural entities and entrenched property interests. These barriers are, in part, the result of Lockean frameworks requiring human-like cognitive capacities for legal recognition.

While RoN movements have achieved limited recognition through legal pluralism and personhood mechanisms, they operate within epistemic constraints that systematically marginalise non-anthropocentric understandings. The research concludes that without addressing foundational Lockean principles underpinning Anglo-American juridical systems, RoN initiatives risk reinforcing the anthropocentric paradigm they seek to challenge, rendering them symbolic rather than substantively transformative.