The Rights of Nature: A Conversation at the Edge of Law and Life

Is a river alive?

Does a forest have the same rights as a person?

Who speaks for the mountain - and according to whom?

There are not hypothetical questions or poetic musings! They strike at the heart of a dynamic and transformative legal movement taking root across the world: the Rights of Nature (RoN) movement. From Latin America to Aotearoa New Zealand, from tribal nations in the United States to European courtrooms, legal systems are beginning to grapple with a revolutionary idea: that Nature is not property to be owned or a commodity to be traded, but a rights-bearing entity with its own “personhood” to be represented.

This panel brings together some of the world’s most influential thinkers, practitioners, and advocates working at the forefront of this global movement. Together, we will explore the philosophical foundations, political tensions, and practical implications of a world in which rivers, mountains, forests, and ecosystems are recognized as legal persons.

RoN has grown exponentially over the past two decades. In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to enshrine the rights of Nature into its national constitution, recognizing ecosystems as subjects with the right to “exist, persist, maintain and regenerate.”

Since then, over 540 legal efforts across the globe – including constitutional amendments, court rulings, Indigenous declarations, local ordinances, and international treaties – have aimed to reconfigure the status of Nature in law.

RoN does more than extend legal protections. It opens up deeper questions about sovereignty, guardianship, cosmology, and the future of life on Earth. Who has the authority to speak for Nature? What happens when Indigenous ontologies, Western legal systems, and environmental ethics collide; or converge? How can legal personhood help reconfigure extractive political economies and build more just ecological futures?


Our panelists include:

Professor César Rodríguez-Garavito – César Rodríguez-Garavito is an earth rights scholar, field lawyer, and founding director of the More Than Human Life (MOTH) Program at NYU School of Law. He is a Professor of Law and Director of the Earth Rights Research and Action (TERRA) Clinic at NYU Law. His work has advanced new ideas and legal actions on issues such as climate justice, Indigenous rights, and what he proposes to call “more-than-human rights” (rights of nature). His ongoing MOTH initiatives include a partnership with Project CETI on the legal implications of AI-assisted translation of sperm whale communication as well as collaborations with the Fungi Foundation and the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks on legal actions to protect the fungal kingdom of life. His recent publications include More-Than-Human Rights: An Ecology of Law, Thought and Narrative for Earthly Flourishing (NYU, ed.), and Climate Change on Trial: Mobilizing Human Rights Litigation to Accelerate Climate Action (Cambridge University Press).


Dr. Manuela Picq – Manuela L. Picq is a Senior Lecturer in the Departments of Political Science and Sexuality, Women’s and Gender Studies at Amherst College (USA). She is the author of Savages and Citizens: How Indigeneity Shapes the State (2024, co-authored with Andrew Canessa), Vernacular Sovereignties: Indigenous Women Challenging World Politics (2018), and Sexualities in World Politics (2015, co-edited with Markus Thiel). She is Editor of the journal Public Humanities and has contributed to international media outlets such as Al Jazeera and the New York Times. Her work at the intersection of scholarship, media, and activism has earned wide recognition, including the Outstanding Scholar Activist Award (2024) from the International Studies Association, a place on the FemiList 100 (2021), and a nomination as a New Generation of Public Intellectuals (2018). Her scholarship is embedded in indigenous struggles for self-determination in Ecuador and Guatemala, and she coordinated the presidential campaign of indigenous water defender Yaku Pérez in Ecuador (2023). Her scholarship takes on legal projects, contributing expert reports to individual cases and amicus briefs to indigenous struggles for self-determination in national and international legal systems - notably setting an international legal precedent in 2022 with the recognition of indigenous ancestral marriage at the OHCHR.


Professor Claire Charters (Ngāti Whakaue, Tūwharetoa, Ngā Puhi, Tainui) – Claire co-directs the Aotearoa New Zealand Centre for Indigenous Peoples and the Law, a leading university centre in Aotearoa focused on research, advocacy and leadership in Indigenous peoples' right. Claire’s research is in Indigenous peoples’ rights in international and constitutional law, often with a comparative focus, including the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, tikanga Māori and the state legal system, the relationship between human rights and Indigenous peoples' rights and on the legitimacy of Indigenous peoples' rights under international law. Claire is also working on a number of collaborative research projects. Claire's research is profiled here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DOHdhzQNu8.
Claire regularly speaks around the globe on International and constitutional law and Indigenous peoples. She has had visiting academic fellowships at the London School of Economics, Kansai University, the European University Institute, Yale, Osgoode Hall (York University, Toronto) and the University of Arizona. She teaches into an inter-sessional course at Columbia University.


This event is moderated by:

- Professor Gerald Torres (Yale Law School); a pioneering legal scholar of environmental justice and tribal law

- Raffaele Sindoni Saposhnik (PhD Student, Yale School of the Environment ’28) whose dissertation explores the political economy of the Rights of Nature.

This conversation is an invitation to rethink what law is, what justice demands, and who gets to be heard in our courts and our climate debates.

Co-sponsored by the Yale Law School, the Yale Environmental Protection Clinic, the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology, and the Yale Environmental Humanities Program.