Doctoral Dissertation Research: How New Legal Doctrine Shapes Human-Environment Relations

This project examines an experimental legal doctrine that defines environmental entities as legal subjects for the purposes of adjudicating land tenure and other resource disputes. Typically, laws treat environmental entities (such as rivers and mountains) as objects of ownership or protection. The new doctrine proposes a dramatic shift in the ways that laws deal with the environment.

The research looks at a sociolegal context where legal experts are struggling to figure out how to implement a law that claims a river is a legal subject. In training a student in methods of scientific data collection and analysis, this research project would develop systems for better understanding of how the rights of nature framework is changing human relationships with the environment. The project also broadens the participation of underrepresented groups in science.

This doctoral research project explores what implications a legal paradigm emphasizing the rights of nature doctrine has for transforming sociolegal relations between human and environmental systems. To carry out this project, the researchers are using a two-pronged approach. On the one hand, the researchers are conducting a series of standardized interviews with judges who have written rights of nature laws.

On the other hand, the researchers are using semi-structured observational methods to study a committee that has been judicially mandated as the legal representative of a river. This research design helps the investigators to understand the rights of nature from both the practical side of policy implementation as well as the more theoretical side of policy conceptualization.

On a scholarly level, this project contributes to theories in legal anthropological and sociolegal studies about the role of bureaucracy in social life.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.