Law at the End of Anthropocene?

Can the legal system account for justice beyond the human? Should it? These are some of the provocative questions we have been grappling with in our respective research trajectories. Our current collaboration emerged from distinct but intersecting concerns – human rights, environmental degradation, legal personhood, and the evolving role of law in pluralistic societies. What we are finding is a shared unease with the traditional boundaries of legal thinking, and a growing interest in how environmental and indigenous perspectives might transform the legal lens altogether. 

Professor Natalia Szablewska recently explored these issues in her keynote ‘Legal personhood: The evolution and implications of legal status across individuals, entities and nature’, presented at the Enabling Multispecies Transitions (MUST) annual consortium in Tampere, Finland. Dr. Wannette Van Eg Dom – Tuinstra spoke on ‘Sustainability and human rights of indigenous peoples’ at the University College Cork Environmental law conference in May 2025. Though distinct in scope, both presentations raised questions that resonate with current public debates on climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, civil unrest, and indigenous justice. 

The legal academia and profession, still largely shaped by the Eurocentric legal traditions, often struggle to accommodate non-dominant conceptions of justice. Indigenous legal philosophies, particularly those grounded in reciprocal relationships with land, waters and nonhuman beings, challenge us to rethink foundational legal concepts such as personhood, sovereignty and property. For example, legal personhood has been extended to rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia, parts of India, and is currently being debated in Poland for the Odra River, while in the United States, wild rice has been recognised as a rights-bearing entity by First Nations communities. 

These are not merely symbolic gestures; rather, they represent practical legal innovations aimed at addressing ecological degradation and environmental injustice. Traditionally confined to areas like planning and resource management, environmental law is now emerging as a foundational lens through which to reconsider (and potentially reconcile) legal systems more broadly. 

This integration is evident in two recent landmark decisions: the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Advisory Opinion on climate change, which affirmed that states have a legal obligation to protect the climate system and prevent climate change-related harm, and the earlier ruling by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), finding that Switzerland’s climate change policies violated human rights by failing to adequately protect its citizens from the effect of climate change. These developments mark a critical shift, signalling the direction of future legal and policy frameworks in the environmental sphere. 

Natalia’s research on multispecies justice explores how human rights law – now and in the future – might account for and accommodate non-human persons. More broadly, her work interrogates how corporate practices impact both human and nonhuman communities, pushing for accountability mechanisms that consider ecological and interspecies justice.  

Grounded in her expertise of stateless people and divided nations, Wannette’s work draws on indigenous rights movements and the transformative ways in which communities resist, reinterpret, and reconfigure state law through their own ontologies and legal systems. She is particularly interested in how indigenous worldviews might be reshaping legal education, which in turn could lead dominant legal systems to become more inclusive and sustainable, with reflective processes and relational outcomes. 

Here at The Open University Law School, researchers are exploring whether ecocide could be recognised as an international crime, alongside work on multispecies justice and the role of technology in sustainable development. For our students, we have also pioneered the undergraduate module W260 ‘International, Environmental and Space Law’, which reflects the rapidly evolving frontiers of legal enquiry. Our forthcoming Master of Laws also adopts a critical approach to the intersecting issues of human rights and environmental law, equipping students to engage with some of the most urgent challenges of our time. 

At a time when mainstream headlines speak of ‘climate breakdown’, ‘ecological tipping points’, ‘democratic backsliding’ and ‘rising authoritarianism’, increasingly linked to environmental injustice, our legal frameworks must rise to meet the challenge. That means questioning what is considered ‘normal’ in law, who is recognised in law as deserving of rights, and who gets to decide.  

Professor Natalia Szablewska

Prof. Natalia Szablewska holds the Chair in Law and Society at The Open University Law School. She is a legal and social scientist specialising in business and human rights, with a focus on applying multispecies justice in this context, and in legal and regulatory responses to structural harm. Her interdisciplinary research has informed policy, practice and legal developments across diverse global contexts.

Dr Wannette Van Eg Dom – Tuinstra

Dr. Wannette Van Eg Dom – Tuinstra is the first Head of Equality, Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility (EDIA) for the Faculty of Business and Law at The Open University. She specialises in European human rights with a particular focus on how the European courts can provide alternative dispute resolution to address minority rights, national self-determination and ethnic conflict.