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This article aims to show that minimalist theories of legal personhood are particularly well suited to evaluating legal personhood proposals for non-humans. It adopts the perspective of Hans Kelsen's theory of legal personhood, which reduces legal persons to bundles of legal norms. Through the lens of Kelsen's theory, the article discusses two case studies: legal personhood for natural features in New Zealand and legal personhood for robots in the EU. While the New Zealand case was an acclaimed success, the EU's proposal was heavily criticised and eventually abandoned. The article explains these widely differing outcomes by highlighting the relevant legal norms and their addressees rather than legal personhood itself. It does so by specifying the rights and obligations that constitute the legal persons, by preventing the attribution of any other rights and obligations to these persons and, finally, by tracing who is ultimately addressed by the relevant rights and obligations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The New Zealand Parliament has recently granted the Whanganui River and the Te Urewera mountain ecosystem rights as legal persons, with a Māori governing board to speak for the nonhuman entities, based upon traditional cultural precepts. Far from an isolated precedent, in what the U.N. Secretary General calls "the fastest growing legal movement of the twenty-first century," legislatures, courts, or voters in Australia, Colombia, Ecuador, Bangladesh, India, Uganda, and the U.S. have also declared that rivers and other living systems have legal rights. This Article chronicles the movement to grant nonhuman entities legal rights. I analyze the statutes and judicial opinions driving this legal evolution, drawing extensively from interviews I conducted with key figures negotiating and advocating for these initiatives. I explain what the current and developing laws and judicial opinions seek to achieve. Deriving from disparate historical, philosophical, and legal backgrounds, they pursue disparate goals; yet all of the moves to grant legal rights to nonhuman entities aim to enshrine in the law the fundamental symbiosis between human and nonhuman ecological health, and to empower suitable stewards who will nurture that symbiosis. I describe how newly vested spokespersons for nature seek to turn novel legal theories into real legal work that protects human and nonhuman communities. I explain who now represents the nonhuman entity and discuss what improvements--for human and nonhuman communities--they hope will redound that would not have resulted from more traditional legal protections. I also discuss early results that have emerged from grants of legal personhood to nonhuman entities. As these laws inscribe new legal relationships between people and nature, they ask: what does it mean to convert from "we own the River" to "we are the River?" I conclude that by sanctifying the interdependent relationship between human needs and healthy ecosystems, granting legal 546 UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LAW REVIEW [Vol. 2021 rights to rivers may contribute to reversing ecological degradation in this century and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2017, rivers in New Zealand, India and Colombia received legal rights and were granted the status of legal persons. The increased legal powers, often a result of groundbreaking agreements or settlements with Indigenous peoples, may improve environmental protection and river management, but they can also challenge the legitimacy of laws and regulations that protect the rivers. In this paper, we compare the new legal rights with two long-standing uses of legal personality in river management, to explore the effects of legal personality in terms of environmental resource management. We argue that governments must ensure that they get the right balance between giving rivers a voice (and the power to be heard), and creating collaborative governance arrangements that strengthen and maintain community support overtime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the concept of litigating for the right to die in New Zealand as of 2015, and it mentions the legal rights of terminally-ill patients, as well as the nation's Crimes Act 1961 and criminal liability for aiding and abetting a person in the commission of suicide. The legal aspects of physician-assisted suicide are addressed, along with the attitudes of New Zealanders regarding the right to die. U.S. constitutional law cases and Oregon's Death with Dignity Act are examined.

The article discusses alternative dispute resolution in places such as New Zealand as of 2015, and it mentions a "Voice of the Child" external advisory group which was convened by Great Britain's Minister of State for Justice and Civil Liberties in an effort to ensure that mediation is focused on achieving the best outcomes for the children. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is examined, along with legal rights and New Zealand's Family Dispute Resolution model.

The article discusses alternative dispute resolution (ADR) in New Zealand, and it mentions issues related to the resolution of property conflicts, attorney-client relations, and New Zealand's Code of Conduct for lawyers. A facilitative mediation process is examined, along with mediators and the country's Arbitration Act 1996. A fused process which includes elements of mediation and arbitration is assessed, as well as an evaluative mediation process and legal rights in New Zealand.

The article discusses the tensions between individual "rights" and the health of all members of a community in regards to proposals for complete smoking bans in closed institutions such as prisons and psychiatric hospitals in places such as Australia and New Zealand, focusing on the impacts of bans on mental illness and quality of life. According to the article, tobacco smoking is the largest single preventable cause of death in Australia. Cancer and public health interventions are examined.

The article focuses on the participation of children and young people in legal proceedings in Aotearoa New Zealand, a Māori name for New Zealand. It mentions about a colloquium held on March 25, 2013 at the University of Auckland on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) which emphasizes on the participate of children in domestic legislation. It discusses the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBORA) which sets out the minimum standards of criminal procedure.

In October 2010 the Waitangi Tribunal released the first chapter of its long-awaited report of the WAI 262 enquiry into indigenous flora and fauna and Maori intellectual property. This chapter focuses on aspects of the claim relating to the Maori language and critiques the development of Māori and Crown generated initiatives to protect and revitalise te reo Māori, including the Māori Language Strategy (Te Rautaki Reo Māori). The Tribunal argues that the Crown must ultimately become Māori speaking. Consideration of this report and the legal protections in place for the Māori language reveals a framework that is incoherent, and largely incapable of achieving the Tribunal's goal, or even of fully protecting what the Tribunal described as "a taonga of quite transcendent importance". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the enactment of the Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act 2009 in New Zealand, and compares it with the established processes of civil asset recovery in Ireland, England and Wales. Salient differences between the models are examined, including the more expansive definitions in Ireland. The article posits that the recovery process in these three jurisdictions in fact is a criminal one which merits the adoption of due process rights, given the promotion of the aims of punishment, the centrality of the targeted individual's culpability, and the powers of the agencies involved. However, the case law in Ireland and England has concluded that the process is civil: perhaps the best that can be expected is the adoption of a "middle ground" approach, which encompasses protective rights while still operating in the civil sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the relationship between equality and liberty. "Basic equality", the fundamental belief in equal human worth, is distinguished from the various equalising projects we might be committed to. It is argued that basic equality itself requires a strong commitment to certain important liberties -- those typically found in a Bill of Rights. The second meaning of "equality", as a policy goal, may clash with particular important liberties and then a balancing process must be entered into. If we bear in mind that fundamental liberties should themselves be protected because of our commitment to basic equality we will be less likely to accept, uncritically, arguments for the suppression of basic freedoms couched in terms of "equality". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the role of the judiciary in interpreting legal rights and legislation in Great Britain and in New Zealand. The discussion focuses on the freedom of the judiciary under the New Zealand Bill of Rights of 1990 (NZBORA) and Britain's Human Rights Act of 1988 (HRA) to rework legislative language so that it produces a rights-friendly meaning to the statutory interpretation of enactments. The "textualist" interpretative method for evaluating statutory provisions that might limit individual rights, the colonial relationship between Great Britain and New Zealand which influences parliamentary sovereignty, and the legitimacy concerns in NZBORA and HRA are mentioned.

The article discusses the increasing number of Muslim dwellers in New Zealand. Muslim migration in the country started hundred years ago until in the 2005 census there were about 23,500 or 1.5% Muslims in the total population and are present in social and urban areas. They created a conversation with the society to ask a place where they could manifest their religious and cultural identity and to be accepted in the cultural society and freedom to demonstrate their identity and to explore the boundaries of multiculturalism.

An introduction is presented which discusses various topics within the issue including practices of ethics committees in New Zealand in idiocultures, issue of digital archiving showing that individual have legal rights to be forgotten and role of lay members in New Zealand ethics committees.

The article discusses New Zealand's medical laws and the roles that advance directives play in promoting individual autonomy in the healthcare decision-making process. The relationship between law and ethics is mentioned, along with New Zealand's Code of Health and Disability Services Consumers’ Rights and various legal cases which deal with topics such as medical treatment consent. English courts and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 are also examined.

The article discusses freedom of expression legal protections for non-verbal activities under New Zealand's Bill of Rights Act 1990 (NZBORA), and it mentions several litigation maters in New Zealand's Supreme Court which deal with the police and the limitations of Section 14 of the NZBORA. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is examined, as well as legal interpretations of the rights contained in NZBORA. A legal cases involving the Irwin Toy Ltd. firm is assessed.

The governance of water is of increasing concern to policy makers. Several property rights systems, which allow for control of water by the individual, community, or state have been advocated, but no approach has been uniformly successful in resolving problems arising from competing uses. Recently, in an attempt to resolve challenges experienced under state control, a number of judicial rulings and statutes have used the 'Rights of Nature' approach to grant rivers legal rights around the world. Here we put forward the proposition that granting legal rights to rivers can be viewed as creating a new property rights system that we term resource self-determination. We test this model of resource self-determination against two cases where rivers have been granted legal rights in New Zealand and India to explicate how resource self-determination has been defined in each case. Although we find that the New Zealand decision results in a more clearly defined property rights system than occurs in India, in neither context are the new bundle of rights complete. We conclude that in the cases examined, unless the definitional shortfalls are addressed, granting legal rights to rivers is unlikely to resolve the long-standing competing use problems affecting these rivers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]