Promovendus: Mw. A.M. Crean

Promotores: J.E. Nijman, A. Leiter, J.A.P. Lorenzo

Duur: 1/9/2024 - 31/8/2028

Abstract:

How can critical disability theory contribute to the development of environmental legal personality? In considering the trajectory of environmental legal personality, contextualising it with reference to disability models of legal subjectivity can facilitate a more nuanced appraisal and imagining of more expansive, relational models. The philosophical quandaries faced by facilitating the rights or interests of nature in law have in significant part been previously addressed in the area of disability justice and philosophy; questions of agency (how can the nonhuman, or non-standard human, possess adequate capacity?), representation (who speaks on their behalf?), and independence (is there an identifiable legal subject definable without external actors?). The urgent struggle for environmental justice is pivoting around these central queries and could benefit from drawing out the asymmetric but enriching ways that similar ground has been tread in critical disability scholarship. The guardianship models being deployed for rivers, forests, and seas have roots in the guardianship structures founded in law to faciliate the diverted legal interests of people deemed incapable of bearing direct legal rights. A major milestone in the legal status of disabled peoples was the UNCRPD and the positive obligations of ensuring adequate support in exercising legal capacity, signalling a shift from the traditional guardianship model. Yet within a decade the landmark case of environmental legal personality in New Zealand set forth a waterfall of similar cases, all of which have relied on varying forms of guardianship. By analysing which specific elements of legal subjectivity were so constrained in previous forms of personality afforded to disabled people, a fuller consideration of what environmental legal personality can strive for will be permitted.