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The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person
- _bxg1 7y agoBetter them than corporations.
- hannasanarion 7y agoThis is a misunderstanding of what "person" means in law. It is not synonymous with "human being". It means a legal entity that can own things and have responsibilities. If corporations are not persons, then they cannot own property, they cannot sue, they cannot be sued, they cannot enter contracts, etc etc etc. The reason corporations are called "corporations" is that they are "incorporated" which is a legal term meaning the creation of a legal person.
- Apocryphon 7y agoNow that would be an interesting system, if corporations were deprived of the benefits of legal personhood.
- davidw 7y agoIt'd basically mean that rather than a company being an independent entity that can take investments and so on, you might end up with rich people being the only ones able to start companies. This book is interesting on the subject: https://amzn.to/2XxbbSX https://amzn.to/2XxbbSX reviewed here in The Economist: https://www.economist.com/business/2011/01/27/the-crescent-and-the-company?story_id=18008627 https://www.economist.com/business/2011/01/27/the-crescent-a...
- bluGill 7y agoIt would be interesting for sure. If corporations cannot get those benefits, how will we as a society get any benefit from people working together for something complex? You cannot make a workable spaceship, car engine (a car might be possible once you have an engine that meets emissions, and several other complex parts). Our modern world is mostly designed around retirement plans owning corporations - without some legal shield 3/4ths of the US should go to prison for Enron Will it be a few rich people who enter into all those contracts and pay their people? At what point do the rich refuse because they have too many people signing contracts on their behalf that they dare not take the risk? There could well be other solutions to the problem. It could be that some alternative is a "better" compromise. However it is not easy to come up with something that doesn't have flaws that are worse than what we have.
- int_19h 7y agoHow about, you still protect the rights of people that make the corporation - as individuals. In other words, if the corporation can name a specific individual whose rights are being infringed, then they have a case. But the corporation by itself can't claim infringement of its rights. So for example, with Citizens United, there's no restriction on individuals that make up the company from making political donations from their own personal funds - including those that they earn as owners or employees of said company. But the company cannot use the funds that it owns as an entity in its own right for the same purpose. If its owners want to use those funds for that purpose, they can have the company pay it to them as dividends (taxed accordingly), and then spend them as they see fit - with their own name attached to any such use. Note that this effectively protects free speech qua speech even for corporations, because there's ultimately always a person speaking.
- tathougies 7y agoSeeing as one individual person can own a corporation and thus have unquestioned control over how the Corp spends its money, then yes one person's individual rights are being infringed upon -- namely the right to use ones material resources to further political interests. In the case of one or a few owners, the owners could alternatively authorize a share buyback to simply transfer money between then and the firm
- int_19h 7y agoThey're welcome to do it in that manner - and the very fact that they can shows that it's not really an infringement on their right. The point is that it's still freedom of John Doe to speak, not freedom of John Doe LLC to speak.
- bluGill 7y agoThat doesn't work, for the exact example you cite. I am not rich enough to afford to buy a TV ad (this includes both production costs and airtime - I'm not an advertising expert nor a good actor so I'd need to hire people to make a good ad). The only way I can afford to get a TV ad out is to get a bunch of like minded people together: create a company with the express purpose of buying our ad, but your just prohibited our company from buying that ad.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> Now that would be an interesting system, if corporations were deprived of the benefits of legal personhood. Then they would just not exist: a corporation is exactly a grant of legal personhood.
- hannasanarion 7y agoThe problem is that corporations as you are thinking of them (private companies) are not the only kind of legal person. Governmental organizations are also incorporated persons, including governments themselves (otherwise you wouldn't be able to sue the United States). Non-corporate entities like nonprofits, partnerships, cooperatives, educational institutions, etc are also legal persons, and need to be for the same reasons.
- brianberns 7y agoLegally, you may be right. However, this same term is used politically to give corporations the right to free speech, and hence to make campaign donations, which is ridiculous.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> However, this same term is used politically to give corporations the right to free speech No, it's a different term that is spelled and pronounced the same (that is, it's a different legal sense of “person”, which courts have found corporations to qualify for for completely different reasons.)
- brianberns 7y agoI can't tell if you're serious. If so, do you really think that makes my statement fundamentally incorrect somehow?
- pyuser583 7y agoFree speech is granted by the First Amendment - which also grants freedom of the press. Does the New York Times Corporation benefit from freedom of the press? I’m sure Donald Trump would love it if the answer was “no.”
- cf498 7y agoAuthors are persons and clearly have freedom of speech, no one here is arguing with that.
- jml7c5 7y agoI believe your argument is that, because the author of a NYT piece has the right to free speech, any law prohibiting the NYT from publishing that article is invalid. Not because the NYT has a right to free speech, but because one can "fall back" on the protection afforded to the original author. Doesn't this same protection apply to the author of an advertisement published by a super PAC?
- brlewis 7y agoWhose law? In the U.S. there's a term called "party" for whoever's suing or being sued. It can be a person or a combination of parties. Three people can be sued without collectively being a human being. Also in the U.S., the controversy about corporations being persons has to do with selectively granting them constitutional rights, not about their identity as human beings.
- zapzupnz 7y ago> Three people can be sued without collectively being a human being Wouldn't that simply be three persons?
- dragonwriter 7y ago> In the U.S. there's a term called "party" for whoever's suing or being sued. It can be a person or a combination of parties. A party is a person who is a litigant in a lawsuit, to be a party, one must first be a legal person. > Also in the U.S., the controversy about corporations being persons has to do with selectively granting them constitutional rights, That's actually a controversy about a different kind of personhood than is being discussed (that is whether they are within the scope of “person” in the sense used in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment, which has been addressed not in terms of juridical personhood but in terms of the necessity of such to give effect to rights of natural persons acting through the corporation.)
- cperciva 7y agoCorporations have the advantage that it's clear who speaks in their behalf. If you give legal status to rivers -- or trees, or whales -- what you're really doing is giving legal standing to someone who claims to be acting on their behalf. Who gets to decide who represents these persons?
- throwaway2048 7y agoWho speaks on the behalf of the mentally handicapped, and children without parents? Are they people?
- cperciva 7y agoThe simple answer is that we have over a thousand years of jurisprudence to answer that question. In some cases it's the next of kin; in some cases it's a state-appointed guardian. But even with the benefit of all that law we still have many courtroom arguments over who gets to decide what is best for individuals who are only partially able to speak for themselves. When we move beyond natural persons and corporations, we have far less jurisprudence to rely upon and they can't express their desires at all, so it's harder on both counts.
- disordinary 7y agoIwi.
- disordinary 7y agoI dug further and there will be two people who are in charge of representing the river one nominated by the government and the other by local Iwi.
- oska 7y ago> what you're really doing is giving legal standing to someone who claims to be acting on their behalf This does not necessarily follow.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoHere's a link to the paper mentioned at the end of the article; "Should Trees Have Standing?" by Christopher Stone - https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-christopher-d-should-trees-have-standing.pdf https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-christop...
- sandworm101 7y agoLegal personhood is much misunderstood. There is no grand set of rights attached to all persons. There are an infinite different types of persons, entities to which some rights are attached but never all. We in the west normally understand "persons" as in flesh-and-blood physical people but even then what rights a person has depends on all sorts of things, from the location of their birth, to their age, sex, mental capacity, education or wealth. And yes, race can still alter a person's rights under the law. What matters is not the "person" label but what rights this court is willing to recognize at attach to this new type of person.
- int_19h 7y agoWhy call them persons then, when they clearly aren't, and their rights are so different that same right can be fundamental for one type or entity but completely irrelevant to another (e.g. right to life, in the context of legal entities). Basically, what's the benefit of having this single category where everything gets lumped?
- SllX 7y agoConvenience before the courts. Tradition thereafter. Inertia in the body of Law at some point. It works, and wise people don’t seek to fix things that are not actually broken.
- zapzupnz 7y agoBecause law English is not our English. Law uses plenty of terms in completely different ways than everyday and even academic English, but still with specific meaning within its own context. That this meaning is unknown to people outside the profession is not necessarily an issue. It is the job of a good legal professional to make sure we never need know whilst they sort the minutiae between themselves.
- Godel_unicode 7y agoI really hate this type of high-priesthood mentality, encapsulation is really dangerous when it's this leaky.
- khawkins 7y agoThis is philosophical drivel that has only the effect of making politicians seem like they care about the environment. The notions of harm or injustice with respect to the environment are all socially constructed human values we imbue them with. If I dump waste in the river, the river or its creatures aren't going to march into court and demand justice, people will. They will say they are acting on behalf of the interests of the river, its ecosystem, or its living things, but rivers are unthinking geographical features and the animals aren't choosing these advocates. You don't need to engage in such theatrics to protect the environment.
- Apocryphon 7y agoSometimes it takes theatrics to get people to care enough about a resource, especially when it is a commons.
- disordinary 7y agoIt's also an acknowledgement that the anglo-saxon way of law is not the only way.
- wahern 7y agoI'm not quite sure what your premise is: whether giving a river personhood is novel or not novel in Anglo law. But FWIW granting inanimate things a legal personality (with rights and even duties!) has a long history not only in English Common Law but also the Western legal tradition back to the Ancient Greeks.[1] I doubt the practice is confined to the Western legal tradition as it has immense practical utility and is an obvious hack to most any legal system. [1] See, e.g., Lawrence B. Solum, Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences, 70 North Carolina Law Review 1231, 1239 (1992) (https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3447&context=nclr https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...)
- disordinary 7y agoThe article goes into detail about how the river is a living thing in Maori culture.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yayr 7y agoI find this philosophical debate very fascinating. What actually is a person? e.g. one definition claims PERSON = "any entity that has the moral right of self-determination." http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/what_is_a_person/what_is_a_person.php http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/what_is_a_person/what_i... so can a confinable area of nature like a river, a mountain, a planet etc. be such an entity with those rights? Who grants those rights? How is self-determination recognized? For humans the latter is leading to the free will debate, see e.g. here for a start https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy/What_is_a_Person https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy/Wha... so in essence, if a significant amount of humans agree, that the criteria for self-determination are not only the strict ones expressed by humans, why should a natural entity not be treated like a person? edit: the initial reaction so far has been: it can not stand up in court so it cannot be a LEGAL person. So one could challenge: a company can as well not speak in court. The only ones speaking in court are representatives that got somehow chosen. Why could the same not be applied to the person in discussion here?
- pan69 7y agoNot "person", but "legal person": > an individual, company, or other entity which has legal rights and is subject to obligations.
- cperciva 7y agowhy should a natural entity not be treated like a person? The obvious answer here is "ok, they're all persons, and as soon as they can stand up in court and tell us what they want, we'll listen to them".
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- peeters 7y agoTitle is incorrect. It is a Maori River, not The Maori River being talked about here. It is The Whanganui River. National Geographic's title is also confusing, but not outright incorrect as posted here.
- dang 7y agoThanks, we've corrected that.
- peeters 7y agoAwesome! If you see this comment, can you answer me this. I see you guys correct titles all the time. I never know if you guys are just incredibly active comment readers, grep for comments like mine, or rely on flags or something else? I didn't see anything in the FAQ but am just wondering what the best way to bring to admins' attention small title issues like this.
- dang 7y agoWe fix most of them by looking at article titles ourselves, and the rest by reading comments and emails. Flags too, but it's better not to flag a good article because of a bad title, since the flag sticks around after the title is fixed. If you or anyone want to make sure we know about a problem title, emailing hn@ycombinator.com is best. We don't come close to reading all the posts here.
- zapzupnz 7y agoIt makes one wonder why people feel the need to editorialise titles at all. In plenty of subreddits, for instance, the practice is banned.
- Zuider 7y agoEditorializing is prone to abuse, but sometimes it is necessary on various grounds, such as the original title of an article being obtuse, misleading or even offensive. A good title should convey the nature of the subject matter and why it is worth reading. Nothing else.
- alasdair_stark 7y agoI canoed down the Whanganui over Christmas a couple of years ago. It's one of New Zealand's 'Great Walks' with huts to stay in along the way. We were told that the Māori considered the river to be a person and as a sign of respect we should not wash ourselves in it. Aside from that, it did not effect our trip. If anyone is interested, there's more information here - https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/manawatu-whanganui/places/whanganui-national-park/things-to-do/tracks/whanganui-journey/#page-id-7061 https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/ma...
- chriselles 7y agoI hope you enjoyed it! It is a different world once you go over the Whanganui River Road hill.
- chriselles 7y agoI spend a LOT of time on the Whanganui River. What a great article, thanks for sharing! If it is a legal person then I know quite a few people who would like the Whanganui River to be held accountable for its actions in the destruction of personal property. Haha. About 20km up the River is a wool shed I’ve been visiting since 2011. On it is a marker of the highest known modern flooding level. It was shockingly high. Since that time there has been 2 major bouts of river flooding. The most recent was metres above the last record high(above wool shed roofline). That river is bipolar. Absolutely beautiful and deceptively dangerous. The Whanganui River is like an old girlfriend who will always have my heart, but it’s best we spent most of our time apart. It changes literally right before your eyes. Riverside erosion in real time, and rain upriver can raise the river height and speed faster than any other river I have spent time on. It’s like nature on time lapse. A good friend and mentor is on the local Iwi(Maori Tribe) governance board. The best part is there is no mobile phone connectivity up the river. Only hardline or satphone.
- xupybd 7y agoGood to see another kiwi on here. I grew up in Whanganui. You must be pretty far up to run out of cell service. I had service all the way up to the bridge to no where last time I was up that way. It is weird to see the river or as my dad would say awa in hacker news.
- chriselles 7y agoAbsolutely! I’m South Island based, but up there twice a year for the last 8 years. We lose mobile coverage once we are descending on the north side of the hill heading up the river from town. We stay at a farm and Marae owned by the local river people iwi. We hang out between there and Jeresulem further north. Hope your family and friends did ok in the floods. Pretty crazy seeing it here, already shared it and the river folks I’ve been able to reach are really chuffed with the article.
- jaydenseric 7y agoThis is beyond stupid. A lot of practical questions were not answered in the article… - What is the date of birth and gender of this "legal person"? - Is it a New Zealand citizen? - How will the river enroll to vote? How will the river pay it's fines when it fails to vote? - What will happen when the river breaks its banks and destroys property, and someone sues it for damages? Will it be in contempt of court for not showing up to appearances? - If New Zealand enters a major war, can the river be drafted for military service? How do you fine or imprison a river for draft dodging? - Where the river releases it's fluids at the beach, is it engaging in public urination? - If a policeman issues it with a lawful order, and it fails to comply, can it be arrested?
- tjpnz 7y agoIt seems to be having a positive impact on pollution, I wonder if similar could be done for other rivers. For those who don't know many New Zealand rivers are toxic cesspits thanks to years of intensive dairy farming. It's something that successive governments seem unwilling to act on thanks to lobbying from the dairy industry.
- paulhallett 7y agoThis is the second place in Aotearoa New Zealand to be given this status, the first being Te Urewera. The NZ government grants these rights due to their Tapu for the Maori people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Urewera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Urewera
- teddyh 7y agoWasn’t there a river in the US who was going to get this too? https://satwcomic.com/a-whole-new-world https://satwcomic.com/a-whole-new-world