World leading innovation is going on right now in granting legal personhood for mountains, rivers, and forests in New Zealand and elsewhere – but what will this mean for governance and how these new ‘entities’ relate with both companies, people and the law?

Not many have considered the practical implications of this yet, so it was a privilege to co-write this article with David Jefferson and Elizabeth Macpherson for the Transnational Environmental Law journal. The article is titled “Experiments with the Extension of Legal Personality to Ecosystems and Beyond-Human Organisms: Challenges and Opportunities for Company Law”.

This has also been recorded as an audio version to help more people access the content and reach new audiences who might not otherwise read the content of an academic article.  Since the audio version was released on seeds podcast as episode #353 it has already been listened to hundreds of times from around the world.    

The topics covered are in the article, with audio timestamps, are:
01:51: Abstract
03:15: Part 1: Introduction
09:46: Part 2: The Company law dimensions of legal personality for ecosystems and behind-human beings. Setting a research agenda
16:12: Part 3: The nature of companies and ecosystems as legal persons
35:05: Part 4: Relationships between Companies and Ecological Communities as legal persons: A Though Experiment
46:48: Part 5: Reflections on the possibilities for a reimagination of Company law
54:39: Acknowledgments

You can access the article here or the the audio here.

Steven Moe is a partner at Parry Field Lawyers. He has 20 years’ experience practising in New Zealand, England, Australia and Japan and often helps start-ups, investors, tech companies, charities and purpose driven businesses. He has a focus on empowering impact and often helps clients get their legal structures right.