Concepts of Intrinsic Legal Relevance and Their Openness to Nature

As this book discusses the legal status of nature and whether and how it can be enhanced, it is, therefore, crucial to identify what it means to be legally relevant and in what forms enhanced legal relevance may appear. The chapter seeks to explain how concepts of intrinsic legal relevance, such as legal capacity, legal rights, legal personality and legal standing, differ and correlate. After briefly discussing legal capacity, the chapter extensively analyses the concepts of legal rights and legal personhood, before turning to the notion of legal standing. In doing so, it seeks to answer whether these legal statuses are inherently anthropocentric, i.e. tailored to the human being, or whether they are sufficiently open to also apply to non-human natural entities. In that respect, the chapter argues that the positivist, abstract and instrumental conception of law in Western legal systems favors the latter view and that there is thus no legal obstacle to granting a status of intrinsic legal relevance to nature. However, it does not follow an “anything goes” approach but rather argues that statuses of intrinsic legal relevance require the capability of having an interest that can be legally protected, which only applies to living beings.