The Search for Standards: A Jurisprudential Analysis of the Ecuadorian Rights of Nature

On May 6th, 2019, the Constitutional Court of Ecuador selected a case that alleged a violation of the Rights of Nature (RoN), the corpus of legal rights given to Nature, to develop jurisprudence on what the standards of the concept are. Historically, this lack of intelligible standards for the RoN has led many to dismiss the concept as unworkable. Therefore, this article brings together the reasoning of sixteen RoN cases to answer each of the necessary questions to create a standard for the Ecuadorian courts: What is “Nature”, what are its rights, what rules and actions may violate these rights, and what mitigating factors may affect whether an action or rule is a violation of these rights. From this, we are able to reason that “Nature” includes non-artificial, mostly biotic beings that usually do not need to be jurisdictionally defined, that are rarely protected from environmentally degradative rules but which are protected from environmentally degradative actions, when those actions lack sufficient economic justification, are not necessary, and are not justified through competing rights. In the end, we find sufficient congealed reasoning to answer the most unique issues the idea faces. We conclude that the RoN is not unworkable, that many of their issues are common to conventional systems of rights, and thus that they hold great potential through their standardized, rational application.