Beyond the rights of nature: law, property, and the re-making of the natural world

Faculty Colloquium

Guest speaker: Veronica Pecile (University of Palermo)

Discutant: Garance Thomas (Sciences Po Law School)

In this talk I explore how law constructs nature, focusing on property as the legal form structuring relations between humans and the natural world. Recent developments such as the rights of nature have contributed to extending legal personhood to natural entities like rivers, forests, and entire ecosystems. Yet these innovations do not challenge the conceptual premises of Western modern law, grounded in hierarchical and extractive relations with the natural world and sustained by the persistence of the modern subject-owner.

Drawing on a critique of new materialism, I argue that the ecological crisis cannot be addressed in law solely through the extension of personhood to natural entities. Instead, I propose to consider property as a legal form through which law makes and unmakes nature, and to investigate the possibility of reviving non-exclusive forms of ownership that have long occupied marginal positions within modern legal systems.

To this end, I examine the Venetian lagoon as a legal artefact historically shaped by shifting balances between collective and individual rights, where processes of enclosure continue to encounter resistance articulated through alternative conceptions of property.