ABSTRACT
The legal rights of children have long since been recognized in principle, and are still expanding in practice. Witness, just within recent time, In re Gault, the United States Supreme Court decision guaranteeing basic constitutional protections to juvenile defendants, and the Voting Rights Act of 1970, with its lowering of the voting age to eighteen. The attribution of a legal conscience, legal intellect, legal freedom, or liberty and power of free choice and action, and corresponding legal obligations growing out of such qualities, faculties and action - implies a palpable contradiction in terms. The popular conception of the Jew in the thirteenth century contributed to a law which treated them, as one legal commentator has observed, as men ferae naturae, protected by a quasi-forest law. This chapter recognizes legal rights of forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called "natural objects" in the environment - indeed, of the natural environment as a whole.
