Law is made in the image of a human, and it has structured whose subjectivity matters.
Although legal systems typically assume only humans can bear injury or seek justice, this conceptualization has been cracking. Without fully jettisoning law’s emancipatory potential, to address ecological crises—the polycrisis of our times—it is necessary to ask what a dispute resolution system that does not stop at the human could look like. What would it mean for law to transcend the Anthropocene and find itself rooted in forests, bees, mountains, and dirt, not as passive objects but as entangled kin that sustain life? If law has been an accomplice to encroaching entropy, could it now become an ally in its undoing?
The current crisis of legal subjectivity is not merely about endowing rivers and forests with personhood but reckoning with the fundamental failure of the law to grasp interdependence and relationality. Enshrined in centuries of jurisprudence, the legal subject is a construct designed to uphold exclusion: between human and nonhuman, subject and object, life and resource. It is a framework that was never meant to accommodate forests, rivers, or disappearing coastlines as agents.
The Rights of Nature movement has offered fleeting glimpses of what law could be. In 2017, the Constitutional Court of Colombia recognized the Atrato River as a rights-bearing entity, citing its critical ecological role and sacred value to Indigenous communities. The court appointed a panel to represent the river’s interests, creating a precedent for shared ecological governance. In 2017, New Zealand recognized the Whanganui River as a legal person with rights and appointed dual guardians from both the Māori iwi and the New Zealand Government.. The arrangement enshrined legal representation, and an ethic of relational stewardship rooted in Māori cosmology and the principle of whakapapa (genealogical connection). In January 2025, New Zealand granted legal personhood to Mount Taranaki (Taranaki Maunga), acknowledging its status as an ancestor within Māori worldviews. The governance structure, made up of Māori and state representatives, was explicitly framed as one of co-responsibility, rejecting ownership and reinforcing the idea that the mountain has its own well-being that law must safeguard.
Alongside these state-recognized shifts, a second wave of efforts has emerged. This wave is not driven by courts or states alone, but by coalitions of artists, scientists, lawyers, and local communities. For instance, the MOTH Collective’s petition to Ecuador’s copyright office to recognise the Los Cedros forest’s co-creation of a song furthers the legal personhood established for the forest. Similarly, the Nonhuman Rights Project has filed cases on behalf of animals to recognize them as persons under law.
These initiatives are carried out in an ad hoc fashion and do not represent a comprehensive solution. What happens when the law itself, neglecting the living systems that sustain it, becomes irrelevant in the world it claims to order?
What would a more-than-human (MOTH) court do?
A courtroom is not a self-contained physical Arcadia, sealed off from the world it ends up governing. It is a malleable terrain of judicial processes culminating in a physical space. If courts exist to serve justice, their jurisdiction cannot remain confined to human litigants.
Although our more-than-human kin have already entered courtrooms in different ways, a MOTH court is not about changing one law or bringing in a few amendments using an “add more-than-humans and stir” approach. Rather, it aims to overhaul the law’s current limitations. For instance, when a coastline loses landmass every year, the evidence presented in a MOTH court might not just come from affected human residents, but from the coastline itself: erosion patterns, altered salinity levels, displaced mangrove roots, and satellite data tracking land recession, as has been the case of Machángara River in Quito. Interpreters in such a courtroom include marine ecologists, soil biologists, and even local fisher communities who know the coast’s condition intimately. Testimony would not be metaphorical but material, layered, and multisensory, demanding that the law attend to loss not only as land, but as life-form. Such recognition of natural entities as living beings has started, for instance in the case of the Whanganui river in New Zealand and the Atrato River (mentioned above). Similarly, Spain’s 2022 law granted legal rights to the Mar Menor lagoon, and Ecuador’s coastal and marine ecosystems received constitutional backing in late 2024.
In recent years, cetacean researchers and sound artists have begun recording the distressed auditory responses of whales to underwater noise pollution through nonhuman animal communications technologies (NACTs). Humpbacks sing intricate, evolving songs,sonic lifelines used for navigation, communication, and even expressions of grief. The incursion of cargo ships and sonar disrupts these soundscapes, disorienting and harming marine life. In a MOTH court, the evidence might come not only through oceanographers or bio-acousticians but from the whales themselves: from altered migration paths, song fragmentation, and rising instances of stranding. The courtroom might listen to the mournful tones of the humpback or the dissonant frequencies recorded in disturbed waters. This testimony must compel not just recognition of harm but an ethical response – should shipping lanes shift when non-human distress is registered? Might the burden of adjustment fall on us, rather than those whose homes we violate? This is not a mere claim of injury but a claim for a different ethic which transcends treating more-than-human distress as collateral damage to development towards grounds for legal and moral redress. In this example of cetaceans, it would mean taking stock of sonic traces, migratory shifts, and acoustic distress and expanding the epistemic contours of admissible evidence to bring within its fold newer admissible claims.
The ecologically embedded human
We are imbricated with the resplendent weirdness of our more-than-human kin. When bats disappear, mosquito-borne diseases surge, increasing infant mortality. When forests are cleared, zoonotic spillovers multiply, birthing pandemics like COVID-19. The damage inflicted on one species reverberates across ecosystems, collapsing the fiction that harm stops at human borders.
Yet our legal systems remain rigidly anthropocentric, treating justice as an individual concern even as survival is relational. It measures ecological harm through the narrow lens of human injury, leaving entire landscapes, species, and ecosystems outside the scope of legal remedy. It could be that suggesting justice should extend to more-than-human life in the abstract risks speaking with such generality that all opportunities for nuance, depth, and singularity are lost. But rather than being immobilized by these complexities, we can begin by recentering the human litigant, bearing fully in mind that this would be an ecologically embedded human.
To imagine a MOTH court, we must first discard the fiction of the self-contained legal subject.
The MOTH court is not about extending rights to nature in a vacuum, nor is it an act of human generosity. It is a fundamental reckoning with the reality that human and more-than-human life are co-constituted. It does not grant legal personhood as a symbolic gesture but forces law to recognize the entanglements that sustain life. Ultimately, the question is not whether it is possible to create a MOTH court, but whether we can afford to step back from building the political will necessary to make it a reality.