ABSTRACT
Recent norms and judicial decisions on the Rights of Nature (RON) place life at the center of legal discourse in Latin America. This “legal revolution” thus purports to upend the paradigm of solely human legal subjectivity in recognizing the personhood of nature. Nevertheless, the RON approach seems to depend on an assumption that the form of law is primarily linguistic and propositional. In this way, it reveals another critical assumption: that law is a system of norms made by humans to regulate human conduct in relation to an externally existing natural world, thereby insisting on a separation between law and life processes. This chapter argues that recognizing nature as a legal person and subject of rights falls short if law is understood as a matter of human language only and nature is understood as an adequate conception of cosmological interdependencies between “all that exists.” The thesis of law as language seems to reinforce a much-contested rift between mind and body, culture and nature, among other boundary-making notions at the root of modern thought and practice. In what sense, then, could conjuring other-than-human beings as agents of legal meaning, rather than mere recipients of state-sanctioned rights, transform what we mean by law and RON in Latin America?
