Legal Invisibility

The fact that I had no legal status in the United States all these years made me a passionate Liberian, a shameless African. Today`s Western legal system does not recognize “nature” or “the environment” as a legal entity. It has also not recognised individual areas, such as certain rivers and forests, as legal persons and therefore has the possibility, through human representatives, to legally limit potential damage or remedy damage such as pollution. This non-recognition of personality serves to erase cosmologies that are important to colonized peoples (First Nations) in many jurisdictions and that are increasingly invoked by these peoples as they seek autonomy or respect for a distinct cultural identity. As Umberto Eco comments. Macpherson, E., J. Torres Ventura, and F. ClavijoOspina. 2020. Constitutional Law, Ecosystems and Indigenous Peoples in Colombia: Biocultural Rights and Entities. Transnational Environmental Law 9(3): 521-540.

This denial of personality, the non-recognition of signs and the contempt for cosmology are a way of building a legal world. However, this is not the only way,[58] and we must be aware that personality is a legal construct, something that reflects values that could be challenged and is based on understandings that are culturally and therefore temporally contingent. This is reflected in the emerging and very unsystematic sui generis recognition of domains as distinct legal entities that have a unique status or could be understood as geomorphic rights [17]. Recognition, for example in New Zealand law, is domain-specific. It is a matter of domain-by-domain status that designates some places and enhances some relationships, but does not add value to others. It refers to a defined place such as a particular forest or river rather than to the natural world itself, although personality recognition for that region is advocated by ecologists with a broader concern and could be linked to claims related to “rights to nature” [40]. It does not ensure the protection of all non-human life forms throughout the jurisdiction, for example, native and imported flora and fauna living outside the territory. Nor does it protect “nature” or “the environment” in any national or provincial jurisdiction, unlike the natural rights enshrined in Ecuador`s Constitution and similar rights in Bolivia under the Ley de Derechos de la Madre Tierra (the law of Mother Earth). It is an inspiring way of thinking about place, property, rights and law.

It stems from a unique respect for peoples whose pre-colonial law has been overridden by a colonizing state originating in Europe, that is, colonialism. A final conclusion is broader than thinking of areas as an emerging policy. The conclusion is that we are asking the wrong legal questions about personality. We don`t have to attribute personality to domains, nonhuman animals, forms of artificial intelligence that may never happen, or nature itself. Rather than conceiving of these specific or general corporations as legal entities with legal status and enforceable rights on their behalf without obligations, it is both more practical and more difficult to understand them as companies to which we have obligations. We can practice an ethic of care for nonhuman animals, for nature and for the built environment based on respect for past and future generations, without conferring rights. Such thinking means that states, companies and individuals have responsibilities, but there is no need for responsibility from rivers, trees, wildlife, ancestors and Mother Earth. The Te Urewera Act of 2014 (NZ) also established an 821-square-mile forest, the ancestral home and “living ancestor” of the Tühoe people, as a legal entity [28, 54, 85]. The law states that “Te Urewera has an identity in itself” with “its own legal recognition” as a “legal person” with “all the rights, powers, duties and obligations of a legal person”. Te Urewera is the owner of herself, represented by a board of directors – her guardians. The estate was once a national park.

The Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa Trust is the penultimate step in the recognition of Mount Taranaki as a separate legal entity that is a living ancestor of the Te Atiawa people. It includes land confiscated for more than a century by alienation of this people, allocated to settlers and acting as a major tourist destination that contradicted both traditional and ecological values [101]. The hegemonic understanding of place in contemporary Western law – and more broadly in international law – is secular, positivist, instrumental [29, 72, 92]. It recognizes that a particular place may be of particular importance to followers of one or more religious denominations, as evidenced, for example, by the Dome of the Rock dispute, or may have aesthetic, historical and other values [34, 60, 61, 90]. However, he does not understand these places as the ability to act. We react to it rather than go through it. Like nonhuman animals, they are conceptually subordinated to entities that national and international law considers to be personality, which, unlike places, confers on these entities legally recognized rights and obligations in addition to their reputation in judicial proceedings [71]. This subordination is a matter of habit and administrative convenience, taken for granted in day-to-day public administration and legal practice, but as such is not inevitable. It is the manifestation of a certain way of thinking about law and rights, hegemonic rather than universal. We can analyze this thinking by considering personality as a concept that includes signs and rights, has legal obstacles based on categories, and is potentially open to change [24, 29]. However, one theme that runs through much of the literature is that invisibility can corrupt. In The Lord of the Rings, putting on the ring makes you invisible, but it also rots your soul and makes you visible to the evil that comes.

In The Republic, a man with an invisibility ring is used as support for the argument that a person who can do evil without consequences will. But legal invisibility meant I wasn`t eligible for federal aid, so I had to refuse. Personality can also be interpreted in terms of responsibilities. The main responsibility, which is so axiomatic that it is often underestimated in the literature, is to act within the law of the respective jurisdiction. It is both a question of legitimacy and power, the application of the rules being an indicator of state status [8]. Conversely, the erasure of rules based on a cosmology that existed before colonization and that does not take into account the understanding of the place of a colonized people (in which spirits or other metaphysical beings have free will and there is reciprocity among all living beings) is a key facet of the colonizing state and the submission of that state to the territories where First Nations live [21, 66]. Liability, broadly defined, includes liability for damage resulting from an act or omission of a legal person, such as the extent of compensation for injuries to a human animal, other animals and facilities caused by a man-made disaster [16, 18, 55]. The influential conceptualization of Hohfeld`s rights, deepened by figures like Honoré, she understands it as a correlate of responsibilities [31, 46, 47, 48, 88]. It is a challenge when the law assigns rights to nature or a territory, but tacitly absolves these people of any responsibility. One cannot sue the Spirit of the Earth or obtain compensation for injuries attributed to the river god, although in many pre-colonial jurisdictions metaphysical entities functioned as legal entities.

Arnold, B.B. 2016. Is the zombie my neighbor: The zombie apocalypse as a lens to understand the legal entity. Canberra Law Review 14(1): 25-46. I attended private colleges and high schools because they were of better quality, yes, but also because public colleges and high schools asked too many questions about my legal status. Even the prefixes we use to describe those who have no legal status indicate their alleged “anomaly”: extralegal, irregular, illegal, unauthorized. When I finally got a U.S. residency card in 2002 — at the age of 20 — I bowed to my mother out of gratitude, ripped off the albatross and traded it for something healthier: freedom of movement, which comes with legal visibility. On the basis of the preceding paragraphs, we could conduct an experiment of reflection on whether Antarctica could and should be considered as a legal entity and not as the object of actions by candidates and by far by other nations contributing to global warming. It is not a political regime and it is not owned or occupied (now or in the past) by distinct indigenous peoples, unlike the peoples of the Arctic regions of Scandinavia, Russia, the United States and Canada.

It is legally a white space, written and existing between the words of international law that privilege the politics of the great powers. Tiunov, O. 1993. The international legal personality of States: problems and solutions. St Louis University Law Journal 37: 323-334. Eco`s comment on lies is relevant because the importance of status means that there is an incentive, if not mandatory, to undermine the rules by falsely asserting a certain status (thereby illegally acquiring authority or removing legal obstruction), often through the use of completely false or fraudulently altered signifiers such as academic test walls. Naturalization papers, credit cards and passports. The law as a matter of signs builds on such signs and reflexively seeks to punish entities that use signs to tell lies about personality, a recursion that reflects Gadamer`s hermeneutic circle as a means of understanding [11, 39]. The genus is grouped in the genus “Wells”.