Should Trees Have Standing? Law, Morality, and the Environment

Legal scholar and environmentalist Christopher Stone was born in New York City and educated at Harvard University and Yale University, where he received his law degree in 1962. A fellow in law and economics at the University of Chicago from 1962 to 1963, Stone then joined the law firm of Cravath, Swaine, and Moore. In 1965 he became associate professor of law at the University of Southern California and since 1969 has served as professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles. Stone's interests and writings have helped focus public attention on environmental law and the ethics of corporate practices concerning the environment. Two of his works in particular, Should Trees Have…  More Standing? (1974) and Where the Law Ends (1975), were both highly controversial and received widespread publicity because of the strong advocacy positions they espoused. Should Trees Have Standing? was written as a rebuttal to the Supreme Court's ruling against the attempt by the Sierra Club to block the building of a recreational complex in a wilderness area of the Sierra Nevadas. In this work, Stone asserts that nature and natural objects can be regarded as subjects of legal rights. This unique argument was an early milestone in the emerging field of environmental law. In Where the Law Ends, Stone insists that the law must hold corporations fully accountable when they act irresponsibly, whether by producing faulty products or polluting the environment. To enforce such accountability, he argues that the courts can intrude into the internal affairs of a business and require changes in corporate policies and practices. His novel argument for the "social control" of corporate behavior had widespread impact on both corporate management and the law.  Less