Beginning in the 2010s, rivers have captured the legal imagination of judges, legislators and activists alike, as part of a rapidly growing phenomenon described by UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David Boyd as ‘a legal revolution that could save the world’. Investigating river cases in jurisdictions as diverse as Aotearoa New Zealand, Colombia, India, the United States and Australia, and following Nicole Graham's suggestion that the non-human world is constantly reconstituted within an all-encompassing legal cosmology for which any observable ‘thing’, any ‘object’, any landscape, is always, inherently, and inevitably a ‘lawscape’, this paper explores the legal and the ontological nature of ‘the river’. By casting traditional riparian doctrines against novel rights of Nature judgments, the paper highlights the interconnected and interdependent legal relationship between artificially construed human and non-human worlds, and observes a series of perceptible generational shifts in the legal and ontological treatment of rivers, from an abstract near-neglect, to a rights-based discourse, and ending (for the moment at least) in a deeply relational re-conceptualisation.

中文翻译：

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人类世的河流、法律和正义

从 2010 年代开始，河流吸引了法官、立法者和活动家等人的法律想象力，这是联合国人权与环境问题特别报告员戴维·博伊德 (David Boyd) 将其描述为“一场可以拯救世界的法律革命”的快速增长现象的一部分'。在新西兰、哥伦比亚、印度、美国和澳大利亚等不同司法管辖区调查河流案件，并遵循 Nicole Graham 的建议，即非人类世界在一个包罗万象的法律宇宙学中不断重构，任何可观察到的“事物” ，任何“物体”，任何景观，始终是内在的、不可避免的“法律景观”，本文探讨了“河流”的法律和本体论性质。通过将传统的河岸学说与新的自然权利判断相悖，