Of rivers, law and justice in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Beginning in the 2010s, rivers have captured the legal imagination of judges, legislators and activists alike, as part of a rapidly growing phenomenon described by UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David Boyd as ‘a legal revolution that could save the world’. Investigating river cases in jurisdictions as diverse as Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia, India, the United States and Australia, and following Nicole Graham's suggestion that the non‐human world is constantly reconstituted within an all‐encompassing legal cosmology for which any observable ‘thing’, any ‘object’, any landscape, is always, inherently, and inevitably a ‘lawscape’, this paper explores the legal and the ontological nature of ‘the river’. By casting traditional riparian doctrines against novel rights of Nature judgments, the paper highlights the interconnected and interdependent legal relationship between artificially construed human and non‐human worlds, and observes a series of perceptible generational shifts in the legal and ontological treatment of rivers, from an abstract near‐neglect, to a rights‐based discourse, and ending (for the moment at least) in a deeply relational re‐conceptualisation.

Geographies of inland waterscapes: Thinking with watery places

“…Any waterscape or landscape is inevitably also a ‘lawscape’ for humans. In their paper, John Page and Alessandro Pelizzon (2024) explore the legal and ontological nature of water bodies, highlighting that the traditional legal distinction between natural and artificial persons is insufficient to capture the ecological and cultural nuances of the bio‐social and culturally pluralistic contemporary realities. Focusing on the examples of rivers from across the globe (Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia, India, the United States and Australia), they show how spatial re‐imaginings intersect with the law and how this leads to viewing the river as an entity is emerging in jurisprudence with a potential for legal personhood.…”

Terracentric Visions and the Domestication of Aquatic Spaces: A case study of fishers’ huts in the Venetian and Caorle lagoons

“…1-24). For further information on the concept of subjectivity I suggest: Gordon (2018), Charpleix (2018) and Page & Pellizzon (2022).…”