In the run up to the summer vacation, journals and magazines often publish lists of suggested summer reading. It will probably have come too late for the sad and soggy summer of 2012, but for light relief and thought provocation, this slim collection of papers has more than might be supposed to recommend it for inclusion. In 1972, Professor Christopher Stone published “Should Trees Have Standing? Towards Legal Rights for Natural Objects”. Highly readable and only superficially wacky, this splendid essay is reprinted in this collection, together with responses from two philosophers (Mary Warnock, Lorraine Code) and two lawyers (Ngaire Naffine, and Professor Stone again). A foreword from Phillippe Sands might lead one to suppose that in so far as these materials raise a question for genuine legal debate, it belongs to the public side of international law, or to the collection of materials increasingly badged as “Environmental Law”. And perhaps this is right.

But a private international lawyer might pause for thought of his own. Just consider this. The Rome II Regulation (Reg.864/2007) makes special provision for choice of law for non-contractual civil obligations arising out of environmental damage (Art.8). When it was first proposed by the Law Commission that English law abolish the double-actionability rule in Boys v Chaplin for torts committed overseas, replacing it with a uniform “place of damage” rule, one spectre which quickly arose was of civil claims being brought in respect of acid rain, caused or contributed to by filthy coal-fired power stations, having caused damage to fir, fish and fjord in Norway. The awareness that such causes of action might exist, coupled with a related apprehension that the Brussels I Regulation and Lugano Convention might require an English court to recognise a sjudgment of a kind which its own courts would not (yet) have given, suggests that there may be a number of private international law questions to be asked. Perhaps more to the immediate point, if it is correct that a ruined Hindu temple with legal personality under Indian law may institute proceedings before the English courts (Bumper Development Corp v Metropolitan Police Commissioner [1991] 1 WLR 1362), then the pieces of the private law jigsaw may be closer to being completely assembled than may be realised. And before anyone suggests that a forest or a park cannot speak, as though that proved anything, then neither can corporations, universities, incompetents and the unconscious. They act through guardians and other representatives, and they speak through lawyers; and if these can today, it is not inconceivable that an entity accorded personality by another law and recognised for that reason (on which also, see Arab Monetary Fund v Hashim (No 3) [1991] 2 AC 114) might do so tomorrow. Life teaches that the law progresses by unexpected steps, and that it would be rash to assume that the question whether parks and forests might one day be seen as having legal personality is not worth a second thought. And however that may be, anyone who reads Professor Stone’s brilliant original article will feel better for having done so. It may even make up for lack of sunshine.

Postscript: This review was written in July 2012. On 30 August, an agreement was reached between the Crown in right of New Zealand and the Whanganui iwi to confer legal personality on the Whanganui River. Two guardians will act for the river in legal proceedings, which will be a person “in the same way as a company is”, according to a government spokesman. Professor Stone may be heard to be saying that he told us so.