
The Whanganui River in New Zealand is a legal person - sricola
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/2019/04/maori-river-in-new-zealand-is-a-legal-person/
======
chriselles
I spend a LOT of time on the Whanganui River.

What a great article, thanks for sharing!

If it is a legal person then I know quite a few people who would like the
Whanganui River to be held accountable for its actions in the destruction of
personal property. Haha.

About 20km up the River is a wool shed I’ve been visiting since 2011.

On it is a marker of the highest known modern flooding level.

It was shockingly high.

Since that time there has been 2 major bouts of river flooding.

The most recent was metres above the last record high(above wool shed
roofline).

That river is bipolar.

Absolutely beautiful and deceptively dangerous.

The Whanganui River is like an old girlfriend who will always have my heart,
but it’s best we spent most of our time apart.

It changes literally right before your eyes.

Riverside erosion in real time, and rain upriver can raise the river height
and speed faster than any other river I have spent time on.

It’s like nature on time lapse.

A good friend and mentor is on the local Iwi(Maori Tribe) governance board.

The best part is there is no mobile phone connectivity up the river.

Only hardline or satphone.

~~~
xupybd
Good to see another kiwi on here.

I grew up in Whanganui.

You must be pretty far up to run out of cell service. I had service all the
way up to the bridge to no where last time I was up that way.

It is weird to see the river or as my dad would say awa in hacker news.

~~~
chriselles
Absolutely!

I’m South Island based, but up there twice a year for the last 8 years.

We lose mobile coverage once we are descending on the north side of the hill
heading up the river from town.

We stay at a farm and Marae owned by the local river people iwi.

We hang out between there and Jeresulem further north.

Hope your family and friends did ok in the floods.

Pretty crazy seeing it here, already shared it and the river folks I’ve been
able to reach are really chuffed with the article.

------
alasdair_stark
I canoed down the Whanganui over Christmas a couple of years ago. It's one of
New Zealand's 'Great Walks' with huts to stay in along the way.

We were told that the Māori considered the river to be a person and as a sign
of respect we should not wash ourselves in it. Aside from that, it did not
effect our trip.

If anyone is interested, there's more information here -
[https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-
go/ma...](https://www.doc.govt.nz/parks-and-recreation/places-to-go/manawatu-
whanganui/places/whanganui-national-park/things-to-do/tracks/whanganui-
journey/#page-id-7061)

~~~
chriselles
I hope you enjoyed it!

It is a different world once you go over the Whanganui River Road hill.

------
sandworm101
Legal personhood is much misunderstood. There is no grand set of rights
attached to all persons. There are an infinite different types of persons,
entities to which some rights are attached but never all. We in the west
normally understand "persons" as in flesh-and-blood physical people but even
then what rights a person has depends on all sorts of things, from the
location of their birth, to their age, sex, mental capacity, education or
wealth. And yes, race can still alter a person's rights under the law. What
matters is not the "person" label but what rights this court is willing to
recognize at attach to this new type of person.

~~~
int_19h
Why call them persons then, when they clearly aren't, and their rights are so
different that same right can be fundamental for one type or entity but
completely irrelevant to another (e.g. right to life, in the context of legal
entities). Basically, what's the benefit of having this single category where
everything gets lumped?

~~~
basetop
I forgot where I learned this, but I remember someone saying that in law there
are really just two entities - person and property. A person is any entity
that has rights. Only "persons" can have rights in law. A property is anything
that can be owned. And all law is revolved around person and property.

The rights between a human, a corporation and a river might be different, but
the fact that they all have rights is what unites them and why they are
"persons". I believe it is a legacy when only human beings had rights. But the
legal system got abstracted and we wanted to give rights to non-human
entities.

Also, keep in mind that human beings had different rights as well. Some humans
didn't even have rights and were not considered legal persons.

Colloquially, we use person as a synonym for human, but in law, person is
anything with rights.

~~~
markdown
I've always found "US govt VS $200" type court cases to be ridiculous.

Person vs Property.

~~~
mehrdadn
Are they actually titled that way? That's hilarious.

~~~
int_19h
Yep, that's exactly how civil forfeiture works.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Civil_forfeiture_case_US_District_Court_Nebraska_2.png)

~~~
mehrdadn
Wow. I knew civil forfeiture was a claim brought against a property but I
didn't realize that's literally what they would write as the defendant. I
can't believe judges take this seriously...

~~~
pmyteh
There's a long tradition of actions _in rem_ (against 'the thing') in law,
especially in admiralty actions. If you're, say, the Port Authority for a
harbour, and a foreign ship fails to pay its harbour dues, what do you do? The
owner is an ocean away (and difficult to enforce jurisdiction over) but the
ship is sitting right there and can (if necessary) be seized and sold. Looking
at it that way it makes a lot more sense.

------
inflatableDodo
Here's a link to the paper mentioned at the end of the article; "Should Trees
Have Standing?" by Christopher Stone -
[https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-
christop...](https://iseethics.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/stone-christopher-
d-should-trees-have-standing.pdf)

------
yayr
I find this philosophical debate very fascinating. What actually is a person?
e.g. one definition claims

PERSON = "any entity that has the moral right of self-determination."

[http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/what_is_a_person/what_i...](http://www.mind.ilstu.edu/curriculum/what_is_a_person/what_is_a_person.php)

so can a confinable area of nature like a river, a mountain, a planet etc. be
such an entity with those rights? Who grants those rights? How is self-
determination recognized?

For humans the latter is leading to the free will debate, see e.g. here for a
start
[https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy/Wha...](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Philosophy/What_is_a_Person)

so in essence, if a significant amount of humans agree, that the criteria for
self-determination are not only the strict ones expressed by humans, why
should a natural entity not be treated like a person?

edit: the initial reaction so far has been: it can not stand up in court so it
cannot be a LEGAL person. So one could challenge: a company can as well not
speak in court. The only ones speaking in court are representatives that got
somehow chosen. Why could the same not be applied to the person in discussion
here?

~~~
cperciva
_why should a natural entity not be treated like a person?_

The obvious answer here is "ok, they're all persons, and as soon as they can
stand up in court and tell us what they want, we'll listen to them".

~~~
peeters
To which the obvious counterpoint is "ok, so mentally incapacitated people
shouldn't have rights because they can't articulate them?"

~~~
refurb
To which I would reply “Disabled people are humans, so there are non-disabled
humans who have articulated universal rights.”

------
paulhallett
This is the second place in Aotearoa New Zealand to be given this status, the
first being Te Urewera. The NZ government grants these rights due to their
Tapu for the Maori people.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Urewera](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Te_Urewera)

------
tjpnz
It seems to be having a positive impact on pollution, I wonder if similar
could be done for other rivers. For those who don't know many New Zealand
rivers are toxic cesspits thanks to years of intensive dairy farming. It's
something that successive governments seem unwilling to act on thanks to
lobbying from the dairy industry.

------
teddyh
Wasn’t there a river in the US who was going to get this too?

[https://satwcomic.com/a-whole-new-world](https://satwcomic.com/a-whole-new-
world)

------
jaydenseric
This is beyond stupid. A lot of practical questions were not answered in the
article…

\- What is the date of birth and gender of this "legal person"?

\- Is it a New Zealand citizen?

\- How will the river enroll to vote? How will the river pay it's fines when
it fails to vote?

\- What will happen when the river breaks its banks and destroys property, and
someone sues it for damages? Will it be in contempt of court for not showing
up to appearances?

\- If New Zealand enters a major war, can the river be drafted for military
service? How do you fine or imprison a river for draft dodging?

\- Where the river releases it's fluids at the beach, is it engaging in public
urination?

\- If a policeman issues it with a lawful order, and it fails to comply, can
it be arrested?

------
_bxg1
Better them than corporations.

~~~
hannasanarion
This is a misunderstanding of what "person" means in law. It is not synonymous
with "human being". It means a legal entity that can own things and have
responsibilities. If corporations are not persons, then they cannot own
property, they cannot sue, they cannot be sued, they cannot enter contracts,
etc etc etc.

The reason corporations are called "corporations" is that they are
"incorporated" which is a legal term meaning the creation of a legal person.

~~~
Apocryphon
Now that would be an interesting system, if corporations were deprived of the
benefits of legal personhood.

~~~
bluGill
It would be interesting for sure.

If corporations cannot get those benefits, how will we as a society get any
benefit from people working together for something complex? You cannot make a
workable spaceship, car engine (a car might be possible once you have an
engine that meets emissions, and several other complex parts). Our modern
world is mostly designed around retirement plans owning corporations - without
some legal shield 3/4ths of the US should go to prison for Enron

Will it be a few rich people who enter into all those contracts and pay their
people? At what point do the rich refuse because they have too many people
signing contracts on their behalf that they dare not take the risk?

There could well be other solutions to the problem. It could be that some
alternative is a "better" compromise. However it is not easy to come up with
something that doesn't have flaws that are worse than what we have.

~~~
int_19h
How about, you still protect the rights of people that make the corporation -
as individuals. In other words, if the corporation can name a specific
individual whose rights are being infringed, then they have a case. But the
corporation by itself can't claim infringement of its rights.

So for example, with Citizens United, there's no restriction on individuals
that make up the company from making political donations from their own
personal funds - including those that they earn as owners or employees of said
company. But the company cannot use the funds that it owns as an entity in its
own right for the same purpose. If its owners want to use those funds for that
purpose, they can have the company pay it to them as dividends (taxed
accordingly), and then spend them as they see fit - with their own name
attached to any such use.

Note that this effectively protects free speech qua speech even for
corporations, because there's ultimately always a person speaking.

~~~
tathougies
Seeing as one individual person can own a corporation and thus have
unquestioned control over how the Corp spends its money, then yes one person's
individual rights are being infringed upon -- namely the right to use ones
material resources to further political interests. In the case of one or a few
owners, the owners could alternatively authorize a share buyback to simply
transfer money between then and the firm

~~~
int_19h
They're welcome to do it in that manner - and the very fact that they can
shows that it's not really an infringement on their right. The point is that
it's still freedom of John Doe to speak, not freedom of John Doe LLC to speak.

------
khawkins
This is philosophical drivel that has only the effect of making politicians
seem like they care about the environment. The notions of harm or injustice
with respect to the environment are all socially constructed human values we
imbue them with.

If I dump waste in the river, the river or its creatures aren't going to march
into court and demand justice, people will. They will say they are acting on
behalf of the interests of the river, its ecosystem, or its living things, but
rivers are unthinking geographical features and the animals aren't choosing
these advocates.

You don't need to engage in such theatrics to protect the environment.

~~~
jhbadger
On the other hand, is it any different than the legal fiction in the US that
says that Google and Microsoft are "people" themselves rather than businesses
that employ people?

~~~
gonational
Probably not, but I think a pretty vast number of people would agree that
these sorts of corporate legal fictions should also not exist.

Giving a corporation personhood does not give the corporation rights as much
as does take away rights from those who interact with that corporation.

~~~
bunderbunder
Arguably, you can't destroy corporate personhood without doing a lot of damage
to capitalism itself.

One problem that corporate personhood was meant to solve was that owning part
of a business becomes a legally risky thing when the business isn't a separate
person from its owners. Incorporation creates a legal firewall that, for
example, allows me to own stock in Apple without having to fear that I will
get personally sued if they do something wrong, or that someone will be able
to go after my personal assets if they go bankrupt.

It also makes it easier for me to interact with the corporation in certain
ways - for example, if I have a grievance against something Apple did, I can
name a single, easy to identify entity in my lawsuit, rather than having to
pursue a case against a whole slew of individuals. The latter would be a
prohibitively difficult effort, since you'd have to figure out exactly which
individual are responsible in order to name them in the lawsuit, and then deal
with a whole bunch of additional litigation in order to allocate liability
among all the people involved in whatever thing it is you're suing them about.

There is still a question of exactly what rights and responsibilities a
corporate person should get. Many legal jurisdictions, including the United
States, have historically been _very_ liberal in granting natural rights to
corporations, and there's plenty of room to argue that they've gone too far.
But I don't think there's much room for arguing against the idea that at least
some aspects of corporate personhood actually work out to the benefit of
people who interact with corporations.

~~~
gonational
> allows me to own stock in Apple without having to fear that I will get
> personally sued if they do something wrong

This is part of what I mean when I say that corporate personhood takes away
rights from those who interact with corporations. A corporation can feel
financial pain, but it cannot experience the emotional pain of loss, the fear
of which being a deterrent against tortious (or criminal) behavior.

I realize, the notion of personally punishing e.g., XYZ Phone Co shareholders,
because one their phone's battery bursts into flames and kills a child, sounds
a little weird. Should the mother of this child simply accept cash for her
son's life and be happy with it? If that's not fair, who should personally
pay, the CEO? He's just an employee of the corporation, who is beholden to the
shareholders.

------
peeters
Title is incorrect. It is _a_ Maori River, not _The_ Maori River being talked
about here. It is _The_ Whanganui River. National Geographic's title is also
confusing, but not outright incorrect as posted here.

~~~
zapzupnz
It makes one wonder why people feel the need to editorialise titles at all. In
plenty of subreddits, for instance, the practice is banned.

~~~
dang
It's banned here too, but banning a thing doesn't eliminate it. (If only it
were that easy.)

" _Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don 't
editorialize._"
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

