scholarly journals River as a Legal Person

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Jerzy Bieluk

<p>The concepts of recognizing elements of nature as having legal personality have been appearing for many years as proposals for a new approach to ecology. Recent years have brought specific solutions in this regard. Attempts to recognize rivers (but not only rivers) as separate legal entities can be found in various places around the world. This is not a common trend, only a few such cases can be identified in the applicable legislation. The article is devoted to the analysis of the best-known examples of this type of activity. In 2017, the legal system of New Zealand recognized the Whanganui River as a legal person. Talks are ongoing about further solutions of this kind. Apart from environmental protection reasons, the basic motives for this type of solution are cultural considerations – connected with Maori beliefs and values. In the legal systems of India and Colombia, the courts have attempted to recognize the rivers (Ganges and Yamuna in India, the Atrata River, and the entire Amazon ecosystem) as legal persons. The motives for this type of activity were primarily ecological – protecting priceless parts of nature from destruction.</p>

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (20) ◽  
pp. 01-09
Author(s):  
Mark Louis ◽  
Angelina Anne Fernandez ◽  
Nazura Abdul Manap ◽  
Shamini Kandasamy ◽  
Sin Yee Lee

Information technology is taking the world by storm. The technological world is changing rapidly and drastically. Human activities are taken over by robots and computers. The usage of computers and robots has increased productivity in various sectors. The emergence of artificial intelligence has stirred up many debates on both its importance and limitations. Artificial intelligence is directed to the usage of Information Technology in conducting tasks that normally require human intelligence. The expectation of artificial intelligence is high, nevertheless, artificial intelligence has its shortcomings namely the impact of artificial intelligence on the concept of a legal personality. The problem with artificial Intelligence is the debate on whether does it have a legal personality? And another problem is under what situation does the law treat artificial intelligence as an entity with its own rights and obligations. The objective of this article is to examine the various definitions of legal personality and whether artificial intelligence can become a legal person. The article will also examine the criminal liability of artificial intelligence when a crime has been committed. The methodology adopted is qualitative namely Doctrinal Legal Research by analyzing the relevant legal views from various journals on artificial intelligence. The study found out that artificial intelligence has its limitations in defining its legal personality and also in examining the criminal liability when a crime has been committed by robots.


2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-30
Author(s):  
Sebastian Howard Hartford Davis

The article analyses legal materials concerning the legal personality of the Commonwealth of Australia under domestic law. It argues that the Commonwealth as legal person has an existence, as a unit of the legal system, which is conceptually distinct from the Commonwealth of Australia as a nation, and the Commonwealth as federal government of that nation. Current idioms (eg ‘polity’ and ‘body politic’) have a tendency to confuse these distinctions. The article suggests, as a more appropriate way to denote the Commonwealth as legal person, the term ‘constitutional person’.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stephanie Warren

<p>This thesis concerns the recent innovative developments in the Whanganui River and Te Urewera Treaty settlements of 2014. The Whanganui River has become the first specific environmental resource to receive the rights and status of a legal person. Te Urewera has been removed from the 1980 National Parks Act to also become its own legal person. Both legal personalities will be co-managed by boards of equal Crown and iwi members. The Te Urewera Board will, however, be rearranged in 2018 to have a Tūhoe majority, another first for Treaty of Waitangi settlements. These new features are considered particularly innovative in this thesis because of the context of Crown indivisible sovereignty and its unequal share of power in negotiating settlements. This thesis considers the ability of these settlements to provide space for iwi to practice rangatiratanga in relation to the resource that is central to their history and identity. If rangatiratanga is considered in this context to be the ability of iwi to practice self-determination and autonomy, then these settlements go further than previously seen because the application of the legal personality and the way it is co-managed is based for the most part on the worldview of the iwi. However, this worldview will continue to be practiced within the wider context of the English political and legal system. Because the improvement of the health and wellbeing of the Whanganui River and Te Urewera will be based on tikanga and mātauranga, Whanganui iwi and Tūhoe have been provided with more space than the Crown has previously conceded to practice rangatiratanga over these resources.</p>


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erin O'Donnell ◽  
Elizabeth Jane Macpherson

In 2017, rivers in New Zealand, India and Colombia received legal rights and were granted the status of legal persons. The increased legal powers, often a result of groundbreaking agreements or settlements with Indigenous peoples, may improve environmental protection and river management, but they can also challenge the legitimacy of laws and regulations that protect the rivers. In this paper, we compare the new legal rights with two long-standing uses of legal personality in river management, to explore the effects of legal personality in terms of environmental resource management. We argue that governments must ensure that they get the right balance between giving rivers a voice (and the power to be heard), and creating collaborative governance arrangements that strengthen and maintain community support overtime


2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Sayel Mofleh Momani ◽  
Maher Saleh Al-Jubouri ◽  
Noor Akef Al-Dabbas

Each legal system has individuals who are addressed with its rules and that the legal rules of the legal system are designed to regulate the relationship between these individuals, and one individual can have legal personality in more than one legal system. The legal personality of these individuals is highlighted by the relationship between them and the legal system in which arranges for them rights and impose obligations on them. The rights and duties of a legal person are not the same; they vary from person to person within the same legal system, and vary from one legal system to another. With regard to the international legal order, it has its own international legal persons, foremost among them States. As for the individual, his legal status under general international law is still not clearly defined and is a subject of controversy among the jurists and interpreters of international law. We will present the position of international jurisprudence on the status of the individual in the first demand, the rules of international law that address individuals directly in a second demand, and the right to submit complaints and claims at the international level in a third demand.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Stephanie Warren

<p>This thesis concerns the recent innovative developments in the Whanganui River and Te Urewera Treaty settlements of 2014. The Whanganui River has become the first specific environmental resource to receive the rights and status of a legal person. Te Urewera has been removed from the 1980 National Parks Act to also become its own legal person. Both legal personalities will be co-managed by boards of equal Crown and iwi members. The Te Urewera Board will, however, be rearranged in 2018 to have a Tūhoe majority, another first for Treaty of Waitangi settlements. These new features are considered particularly innovative in this thesis because of the context of Crown indivisible sovereignty and its unequal share of power in negotiating settlements. This thesis considers the ability of these settlements to provide space for iwi to practice rangatiratanga in relation to the resource that is central to their history and identity. If rangatiratanga is considered in this context to be the ability of iwi to practice self-determination and autonomy, then these settlements go further than previously seen because the application of the legal personality and the way it is co-managed is based for the most part on the worldview of the iwi. However, this worldview will continue to be practiced within the wider context of the English political and legal system. Because the improvement of the health and wellbeing of the Whanganui River and Te Urewera will be based on tikanga and mātauranga, Whanganui iwi and Tūhoe have been provided with more space than the Crown has previously conceded to practice rangatiratanga over these resources.</p>


1995 ◽  
Vol 13 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 133-142
Author(s):  
A. Smith

As in many parts of the world, the New Zealand gas industry was subject to State intervention, both through ownership and heavy regulation. Policies of recent Governments have been for the State to withdraw from ownership of gas enterprises, and where possible remove regulations so as to open the industry up to greater competition. A new “light-handed” regulatory regime is now being introduced which is designed specifically to deal with the problems associated with those parts of the industry where there is limited scope for competition – in access to pipelines and the pricing of gas transmission and distribution. The new approach is seen as having the potential to bring significant long run advantages to both producers and consumers of gas.


2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Roman Dremliuga ◽  
Pavel Kuznetcov ◽  
Alexey Mamychev

This question of AI legal personhood is mostly theoretical today. In article we try to generalize some common ways that existing in legal theory and practice. We analyze some cases of recognition of untypical legal persons as well enacted statements in Europe and USA. Readers will not find a detailed methodology in the paper, but rather a list of criteria that is helpful to make a decision on granting legal personhood. Practices of European Union and the United States indicate that common approaches to the legal personality of some kinds of AI are already developed. Both countries are strongly against legal personhood of intellectual war machines. Liability for any damage of misbehavior of military AI is still on competence of military officers. In case of civil application of AI there are two options. AI could be as legal person or as an agent of business relations with other legal persons. Every legal person has to be recognized as such by society. All untypical legal persons have wide recognition of society. When considering the issue of introducing a new legal person into the legal system, legislators must take into account the rights of already existing subjects. Policy makers have to analyze how such legal innovation will comply with previous legal order, first of all how it will affect the fundamental rights and freedoms of the human beings. The legal personhood of androgenic robots that can imitate human behavior regarded in paper as a good solution to minimize illegal and immoral acts committed with their involvement. It would be a factor that keep people from taking action against robots very similar to people. Authors conclude that key factors would be how society will react to a new legal person, how changing of legal rules will affect legal system and why it is necessary. At least all new untypical legal persons are recognized by society, affects of the legal system in manageable way and brings definite benefits to state and society.


2018 ◽  
pp. 5-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. M. Grigoryev ◽  
V. A. Pavlyushina

The phenomenon of economic growth is studied by economists and statisticians in various aspects for a long time. Economic theory is devoted to assessing factors of growth in the tradition of R. Solow, R. Barrow, W. Easterly and others. During the last quarter of the century, however, the institutionalists, namely D. North, D. Wallis, B. Weingast as well as D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, have shown the complexity of the problem of development on the part of socioeconomic and political institutions. As a result, solving the problem of how economic growth affects inequality between countries has proved extremely difficult. The modern world is very diverse in terms of development level, and the article offers a new approach to the formation of the idea of stylized facts using cluster analysis. The existing statistics allows to estimate on a unified basis the level of GDP production by 174 countries of the world for 1992—2016. The article presents a structured picture of the world: the distribution of countries in seven clusters, different in levels of development. During the period under review, there was a strong per capita GDP growth in PPP in the middle of the distribution, poverty in various countries declined markedly. At the same time, in 1992—2016, the difference increased not only between rich and poor groups of countries, but also between clusters.


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