A Comparative Jurisprudential Analysis Of Corporate Rights Vs. The Rights Of Nature Through The Lens Of Human Values
Aadil Nadeem Siddique, B.A., LL.B. (Hons.), School of Law, Bennett University, Greater Noida, U.P., India
ABSTRACT
Modern constitutional orders are strikingly generous towards corporations. An entity chartered yesterday, possessed of no body, no biography and nothing older than a filing date, is accepted without much argument into the company of persons. Rivers, forests and glaciers, which long pre-date any court that might judge them, are not. This paper is about that imbalance. I have come to call it the Ontological Hierarchy of legal personhood, and my argument, plainly put, is that it does not survive contact with any serious account of Human Values.
The method is doctrinal and comparative. On the corporate side, I follow the American line from Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward (1819) down to Citizens United v. FEC (2010). On the ecological side, I take up the still- young body of Rights of Nature decisions that have emerged, in the last two decades or so, out of Ecuador, Bolivia, Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia, Bangladesh and India. Read together, these two bodies of law disclose a disparity that is neither an accident of history nor defensible on principled grounds. It is, at bottom, a quiet preference for economic abstraction over ecological fact, and the conceptual apparatus of Human Values gives no cover for it.
Three structural problems run through the asymmetry. First, an evidentiary one: corporations walk into court with- standing more or less presumed, while environmental plaintiffs must clear increasingly demanding injury tests. Second, an ontological one: a legal fiction is treated as the paradigm person, while the living biological systems on which every person depends are treated, by default, as things. Third, there is what I will describe as a constitutional capture, in which the vocabulary of commerce ends up colonising the vocabulary of rights.
From this analysis I draw three reform proposals: a graded conception of legal personhood, calibrated to ontological category; statutory guardianship on the model of the Te Awa Tupua settlement; and a constitutional principle of what I call Ecological Reciprocity, to mediate conflicts between corporate and ecological claims. None of this is about stripping corporations of anything they need. The goal is parity, not demotion—restoring some balance to a legal cosmology that, at present, leans a good deal too far in favour of fiction and away from fact.
Keywords: legal personhood; rights of nature; corporate constitutional rights; comparative environmental jurisprudence; human values.
