Of rivers, law and justice in the Anthropocene

Abstract

Beginning in the 2010s, rivers have captured the legal imagination of judges, legislators and activists alike, as part of a rapidly growing phenomenon described by UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David Boyd as ‘a legal revolution that could save the world’. Investigating river cases in jurisdictions as diverse as Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia, India, the United States and Australia, and following Nicole Graham's suggestion that the non-human world is constantly reconstituted within an all-encompassing legal cosmology for which any observable ‘thing’, any ‘object’, any landscape, is always, inherently, and inevitably a ‘lawscape’, this paper explores the legal and the ontological nature of ‘the river’. By casting traditional riparian doctrines against novel rights of Nature judgments, the paper highlights the interconnected and interdependent legal relationship between artificially construed human and non-human worlds, and observes a series of perceptible generational shifts in the legal and ontological treatment of rivers, from an abstract near-neglect, to a rights-based discourse, and ending (for the moment at least) in a deeply relational re-conceptualisation.