Legal Rights for Rivers

Legal Rights for Rivers PDF Author: Erin O'Donnell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429889607
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 202

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Book Description
In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Colombia were given the status of legal persons, and there was a recent attempt to extend these rights to the Colorado River in the USA. Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced. When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources? To assess what it means to give rivers legal rights and legal personality, this book examines the form and function of environmental water managers (EWMs). These organisations have legal personality, and have been active in water resource management for over two decades. EWMs operate by acquiring water rights from irrigators in rivers where there is insufficient water to maintain ecological health. EWMs can compete with farmers for access to water, but they can also strengthen collaboration between traditionally divergent users of the aquatic environment, such as environmentalists, recreational fishers, hunters, farmers, and hydropower. This book explores how EWMs use the opportunities created by giving nature legal rights, such as the ability to participate in markets, enter contracts, hold property, and enforce those rights in court. However, examination of the EWMs unearths a crucial and unexpected paradox: giving legal rights to nature may increase its legal power, but in doing so it can weaken community support for protecting the environment in the first place. The book develops a new conceptual framework to identify the multiple constructions of the environment in law, and how these constructions can interact to generate these unexpected outcomes. It explores EWMs in the USA and Australia as examples, and assesses the implications of creating legal rights for rivers for water governance. Lessons from the EWMs, as well as early lessons from the new ‘river persons,’ show how to use the law to improve river protection and how to begin to mitigate the problems of the paradox.

Legal Rights for Rivers

Legal Rights for Rivers PDF Author: Erin O'Donnell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429889607
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 2017 four rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand, India, and Colombia were given the status of legal persons, and there was a recent attempt to extend these rights to the Colorado River in the USA. Understanding the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is an urgent challenge for both water resource management and environmental law. Giving rivers legal rights means the law can see rivers as legal persons, thus creating new legal rights which can then be enforced. When rivers are legally people, does that encourage collaboration and partnership between humans and rivers, or establish rivers as another competitor for scarce resources? To assess what it means to give rivers legal rights and legal personality, this book examines the form and function of environmental water managers (EWMs). These organisations have legal personality, and have been active in water resource management for over two decades. EWMs operate by acquiring water rights from irrigators in rivers where there is insufficient water to maintain ecological health. EWMs can compete with farmers for access to water, but they can also strengthen collaboration between traditionally divergent users of the aquatic environment, such as environmentalists, recreational fishers, hunters, farmers, and hydropower. This book explores how EWMs use the opportunities created by giving nature legal rights, such as the ability to participate in markets, enter contracts, hold property, and enforce those rights in court. However, examination of the EWMs unearths a crucial and unexpected paradox: giving legal rights to nature may increase its legal power, but in doing so it can weaken community support for protecting the environment in the first place. The book develops a new conceptual framework to identify the multiple constructions of the environment in law, and how these constructions can interact to generate these unexpected outcomes. It explores EWMs in the USA and Australia as examples, and assesses the implications of creating legal rights for rivers for water governance. Lessons from the EWMs, as well as early lessons from the new ‘river persons,’ show how to use the law to improve river protection and how to begin to mitigate the problems of the paradox.

Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights

Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights PDF Author: Thomas F. Burke
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520243234
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
"Burke drills deep into America's unique culture of litigation and is rewarded with a powerful insight: it is not the public or even lawyers that are so darn litigious, but American law itself. This meticulous, dispassionate book stands not only to advance the debate but—I hope—to reshape it."—Jonathan Rauch, author of Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working "Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights is a fascinating study of the American penchant for public policies that rely on lawsuits to get things done. Burke's analysis is insightful and original. This book compellingly shows that litigious policies have deep roots in our Constitution, culture, and politics."—Charles Epp, author of The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective "Burke's authoritative book demonstrates that the highly litigious American system is not an isolated anomaly but in fact fits in with deeply-rooted elements of American political culture. Where citizens of other countries rely on expert or bureaucratic judgment to resolve disputes, Americans turn to the courts. Equally novel and compelling, Lawyers, Lawsuits, and Legal Rights marshals an impressive set of evidence and delivers a refreshingly well-written look at the state of American litigation."—Frank R. Baumgartner, co-author of Agendas and Instability in American Politics

Teen Legal Rights

Teen Legal Rights PDF Author: David L. Hudson Jr.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1610697006
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
The only book of its kind to examine all aspects of a young adult's legal rights at school, at work, and at home, including recent developments in teen-oriented legislation. Widespread Internet use and evolving privacy concerns compromise the legal rights of teenagers. While smart phones, social networking, and online music downloading pose new legal complications for teens and their parents to navigate, the Supreme Court has grappled with rights concerning every aspect of a young adult's life long before now. This newly updated text, written in accessible language and presented through an informal FAQ format, simplifies the laws, rights, and constitutional implications affecting young people today. In an easy-to-understand, non-intimidating style, First Amendment scholar David L. Hudson Jr. provides an authoritative analysis of the judicial system, utilizing actual court cases and legal arguments to help teens better understand their rights under the law. Additionally, the text presents recent changes and interpretations of legal areas still in debate. This third edition features an updated examination of recent topics that includes cyberbullying, "sexting," social media privacy, and illegal downloads of online content.

The Rights of Nature

The Rights of Nature PDF Author: David R. Boyd
Publisher: ECW Press
ISBN: 1770909664
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
An important and timely recipe for hope for humans and all forms of life Palila v Hawaii. New ZealandÕs Te Urewera Act. Sierra Club v Disney. These legal phrases hardly sound like the makings of a revolution, but beyond the headlines portending environmental catastrophes, a movement of immense import has been building Ñ in courtrooms, legislatures, and communities across the globe. Cultures and laws are transforming to provide a powerful new approach to protecting the planet and the species with whom we share it. Lawyers from California to New York are fighting to gain legal rights for chimpanzees and killer whales, and lawmakers are ending the era of keeping these intelligent animals in captivity. In Hawaii and India, judges have recognized that endangered species Ñ from birds to lions Ñ have the legal right to exist. Around the world, more and more laws are being passed recognizing that ecosystems Ñ rivers, forests, mountains, and more Ñ have legally enforceable rights. And if nature has rights, then humans have responsibilities. In The Rights of Nature, noted environmental lawyer David Boyd tells this remarkable story, which is, at its heart, one of humans as a species finally growing up. Read this book and your world view will be altered forever.

The Legal Rights of Union Stewards

The Legal Rights of Union Stewards PDF Author: Robert M. Schwartz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description


Legal Rights

Legal Rights PDF Author: Pavlos Eleftheriadis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191562793
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
How can there be rights in law? We learn from moral philosophy that rights protect persons in a special way because they have peremptory force. But how can this aspect of practical reason be captured by the law? For many leading legal philosophers the legal order is constructed on the foundations of factual sources and with materials provided by technical argument. For this 'legal positivist' school of jurisprudence, the law endorses rights by some official act suitably communicated. But how can any such legal enactment recreate the proper force of rights? Rights take their meaning and importance from moral reflection, which only expresses itself in practical reasoning. This puzzle about rights invites a reconsideration of the nature and methods of legal doctrine and of jurisprudence itself. Legal Rights argues that the theory of law and legal concepts is a project of moral and political philosophy, the best account of which is to be found in the social contract tradition. It outlines an argument according to which legal rights can be justified before equal citizens under the constraints of public reason. The place of rights in law is explained by the unique position of law as an essential component of the civil condition and a necessary condition for freedom.

Know Your Rights!

Know Your Rights! PDF Author: Richard M. Alderman
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publications
ISBN: 1461662044
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
Richard Alderman, "The People's Lawyer," cuts through the jargon of the "legalese" and helps you protect yourself, your family, and your property. This book gives you practical, easy-to-understand answers to all kinds of everyday questions about divorce, child support, credit, bankruptcy, leases and tenant rights, small claims court, wills and probate, immigration, and much more. Now in its seventh edition, this popular guide uses a simple question and answer format to help you understand and solve many common legal problems. In addition, the author provides sample forms and model letters, including a living will, a medical power of attorney, and durable power of attorney.

Lawyers Beyond Borders

Lawyers Beyond Borders PDF Author: Maria Armoudian
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472038850
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 263

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Book Description
Despite international conventions and human rights declarations, millions of people have suffered and continue to suffer torture, slavery, or violent deaths, with no remedy or recourse. They have fallen, in essence, “below the law,” outside of law’s protection. Often violated by their own governments, sometimes with support from transnational corporations, or nations benefiting from human rights violations, how can these victims find justice? Lawyers Beyond Borders reveals the inner workings of the advances and retreats in the quest for redress and restoration of human rights for those whom international legal-political systems have failed. The process of justice begins in the US, with a handful of human rights lawyers steeped in the American tradition of advancing civil rights through civil litigation. As the civil rights movement gained traction and an ample supply of lawyers, this small cadre turned their attention toward advancing international human rights, via the US legal system. They sought to build another piece of the rights revolution, this time for survivors of egregious human rights violations in faraway lands. These cases were among the most unlikely to be slated for victory: The abuses occurred abroad; the victims are aliens, usually with few, if any, resources; the perpetrators are politically powerful, resourced, and well connected, often members of governments, militaries, or multinational corporations. The legal and political systems’ structures are mostly stacked against these survivors, many who bear the scars of trauma and terror. Lawyers Beyond Borders is about agency. It is about how, in the face of powerful interests and seemingly insurmountable obstacles—political, psychological, economic, geographical, and physical—a small group of lawyers and survivors navigated a terrain of daunting barriers to begin building, case-by-case, new pathways to justice for those who otherwise would have none.

Until They are Seven

Until They are Seven PDF Author: John Wroath
Publisher: Waterside Press
ISBN: 9781872870571
Category : Custody of children
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
An absorbing account of the origins of women's rights to property and children in the UK. A true story which reads like a Victorian novel. 'In law a husband and wife are one: and that one is the husband': Blackstone This was the law until well into the nineteenth century. Until They Are Seven is based on research into the historical background to the modern problems of child custody and access. The result is an absorbing tale of the origins of women's rights to their children and their property in which John Wroath recounts the brave moves by Henrietta Greenhill and Caroline Norton which led to the Infant Custody Act 1839 and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857-the rest being history. The story is also fascinating for the insights it gives into the private lives of several famous people of the time who were involved in or around these events-included among them the prime minister Lord Melbourne, the poet and playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein.

Rights at Work

Rights at Work PDF Author: Michael W. McCann
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226555713
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
McCann explains how wage discrimination battles have raised public legal consciousness and helped reform activists mobilize working women in the pay equity movement over the past two decades. Rights at Work explores the political strategies in more than a dozen pay equity struggles since the late 1970s, including battles of state employees in Washington and Connecticut, as well as city employees in San Jose and Los Angeles. Relying on interviews with over 140 union and feminist activists, McCann shows that, even when the courts failed to correct wage discrimination, litigation and other forms of legal advocacy provided reformers with the legal discourse--the understanding of legal rights and their constraints--for defining and advancing their cause.