SIG-PRG 2026-09-03

Session Recording Summary · 37m 2s · Full notes ↗

Reading: The session centered on the U.S. Supreme Court dissent in *Sierra Club v. Morton* (also referred to as "Mineral King v. Morton"), particularly Justice Douglas's dissent on standing. This served as a short "teaser" text connected to the longer essay chosen for next session: Christopher Stone's **"Should Trees Have Standing?"**, which the dissent cites.

This was largely an organizational kickoff meeting for a new "personhood" research group convened by Sarah, combining participant introductions, collection of research questions, and nomination of readings. The group briefly read and reacted to the *Sierra Club v. Morton* dissent, touching on legal standing, personhood of natural environments, and the tension between adversarial legal systems and ecological wholeness. The deep-dive discussion of the longer text is scheduled for the next session.

• **Sachin (interests):** How fiction writers began basing characters on what they saw on TV; property and personhood (citing Margaret Radin's work); and the "boundary conditions" of identity — how identity often starts as a porous boundary and later gets rendered crystal clear.
• **Group logistics:** Sarah has set up a research group page with a list of research questions (currently all authored by her) and invited participants to contribute their own questions as threaded posts and to nominate readings. Anuraj was managing a recap bot, which was not working for this particular call (limited number of concurrent instances), so participants read and typed rather than relying on it.
• **Personhood of natural environments (Lisa):** Raised the real-world example of a river in New Zealand granted legal personhood, and asked about the Te Awa Tupua Act as a case worth examining.
• **Category errors and the function of law (Ayse):** Argued that law's core function is to *standardize and discretize* in order to scale to an entire society, which forces living ecosystems (a whole valley, river, or its insects) to be broken into discrete, separable units. She questioned whether an ecosystem maps better onto an organization/incorporation than onto a single legal entity, and suggested this reveals "category errors" in the legal system's framework.
• **Standing as a gating doctrine (Nick):** As a lawyer, Nick found the dissent striking on re-reading in light of advancing AI and worsening climate crisis. He explained that standing gates who can even bring a claim. In an adversarial civil system (aimed at equitable relief or damages), there is a conflict with the balancing role of federal agencies: if an organization like the Sierra Club lacks standing, then no one can bring an adversarial claim against private interests that would exploit natural resources.
• **Compromised agencies (Sarah & Nick):** The text notes the compromised nature of federal agencies asked to balance impossibly broad concerns. Nick noted Justice Douglas is charitable — explicitly saying the agencies aren't corrupt, just asked to balance many things — which differs from someone who would "speak for the trees." Both felt this critique feels even more potent now (Nick referenced the current Trump administration).

Questions & Disagreements: - Who should be able to be the plaintiff — a human who can show harm, or the valley/river/ecosystem itself? (raised by Sarah as a central question of the dissent) - Where do you draw the boundary of what counts as "the valley," river, forest, or ecosystem that is the legal subject? Ecosystems have many possible boundaries of differing fidelity depending on which aspects you examine. Sarah noted th

Participants: Sachin, 🙊 Anuraj R, Sarah Friend | utc +2, 🙊 Jenna Dixon, Nick Garcia, LisaRöingBaer-CEST, ayseayse__