Legal Rights for Rivers

Erin O'Donnell is a Senior Fellow and sessional lecturer at the University of Melbourne Law School, Australia. She is also an independent consultant on water markets to the World Bank and has worked on water governance in the public and private sectors for more than 15 years.

• 1. Introduction 2. Constructing the environment in law: making it count 3. Environmental Water Managers: examples of indirect legal personhood for rivers 4. Just another user: environmental water managers in Australia 5. Partnership as success: the EWMs of the Western USA 6. Competing narratives and the paradox of the EWMs 7. Rivers as legal persons: competition and collaboration 8. Legal rights for rivers: a cause for celebration or concern?

"Rivers, wetlands and floodplains are under dire threat across the globe. And with their decline and loss so go the, often, unique plant and animal species that depend on them. In Australia's largest river basin, the Murray-Darling, those threats are being tackled through a new model of environmental watering that deals with the Basin as a single connected system irrespective of jurisdictional boundaries. Erin O'Donnell's insightful and comprehensive examination of the implications of creating legal rights for rivers is a fundamental contribution to answering the question of 'what next'? For those of us committed to seeing healthy rivers surviving in highly modified landscapes where water is fought over, her analysis and arguments serve as a powerful stepping stone to the development of a truly robust and collaborative management approach that is underpinned by the legal rights of rivers." - David Papps, Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder from 2012-2018, Australia"O'Donnell's book is a fantastic piece of scholarship that helps frame the evolving legal context that humans have developed for the natural environment. In particular, its treatment of the implications emerging from according legal personality to water bodies offers invaluable insight into how we value freshwater and other natural resources, and how we seek to protect them for ourselves, our children, and the environment. This work is a vital contribution to the literature on water law and the law of nature, and its analysis will likely serve as a foundation for the further development of these legal areas." - Gabriel Eckstein, Professor of Law, Texas A&M University, USA"Erin O’Donnell’s thought-provoking book explores a new frontier in environmental law, asking whether recognizing the legal rights of rivers will strengthen, or paradoxically weaken, protection for these vital veins of water and life." - David R. Boyd, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment and Associate Professor of Law, Policy, and Sustainability, University of British Columbia, Canada