Recognition of Nature as a Legal Entity: Origins, Constitutionalization, and Law Enforcement Judicial Perspectives

Long reduced by the law to the status of a "thing," nature has, since Christopher Stone's seminal 1972 essay, become the subject of an unprecedented claim: that of legal personhood. This book analyzes this trajectory, from its indigenous philosophical and cosmological foundations to its constitutional enshrinement in South America, then to its global spread to rivers, mountains, and ecosystems, all the way to its international and European recognition-from Spain's Mar Menor law to the three climate-related advisory opinions of 2024-2025 (International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, Inter-American Court, International Court of Justice). Finally, it examines the law enforcement and jurisdictional avenues opened up by the definition of the crime of ecocide and the establishment of international environmental justice.According to the hypothesis put forward, the effective establishment of this legal status requires the convergence of three dynamics: domestic constitutionalization, international consolidation, and criminal internationalization.