A book about the Rights of Nature

Dr. Eric Rubenstein, MA in Polar Law 2025, has agreed a contract with major international academic publishing house Routledge to publish a new book, Legal Personhood and the Rights of Nature: Beyond Anthropocentrism. The book is a revised and expanded version of his Polar Law MA thesis, written under the direction of Dr. Romain Chuffart, Nansen Professor of Arctic Studies at the University of Akureyri.

The Rights of Nature (RoN) movement seeks to extend legal rights to non-human parts of nature, including animals as well as rivers, glaciers, and ecosystems. On a traditional view, rights can only be given to entities that are deemed legal persons; everything else is merely a legal object, such as pieces of property. So if RoN is to extend legal rights to nature, it makes sense to inquire whether nature is the kind of entity that can be a legal person. This book offers an extended defense of the view that nature indeed can be a legal person, and defends the view that being a legal person need not have any connection with persons in the biological, moral, or metaphysical sense. The theoretical discussion is then grounded in examples from the polar regions.