Should Knowledge Have Standing?

Extending Legal Personhood Frameworks to Validated Scientific Knowledge and Its Cyberinfrastructure

Document ID: CNL-TN-2025-005
Version: 1.0
Date: December 13, 2025
Author: Michael P. Hamilton, Ph.D.

AI Assistance Disclosure: This technical note was developed with assistance from Claude (Anthropic, claude-opus-4-5-20250514). The AI contributed to literature review, synthesis of legal and philosophical frameworks, and manuscript preparation. The author takes full responsibility for the content, accuracy, and conclusions.

Abstract

This technical note proposes that validated scientific knowledge should have legal standing—a bundle of rights to preservation, accessibility, continuity, and integrity—with AI systems potentially serving as guardians or embodiments. The argument extends Christopher Stone's landmark 1972 essay "Should Trees Have Standing?" through Elinor Ostrom's unbundling of property rights to propose that knowledge which has undergone systematic validation warrants protection as a distinct legal entity. The framework synthesizes four decades of the author's work on ecosystem rights (including a 1997 call for an "Ecosystem Bill of Rights"), the global rights-of-nature movement (Te Awa Tupua, Mar Menor, Atrato River), recent theoretical advances in pragmatic AI personhood (Leibo et al., 2025), and John Moore's "Science as a Way of Knowing" framework for distinguishing validated knowledge from mere claims. The current dismantling of federal scientific infrastructure—NOAA facing 28% budget cuts, EPA's Office of Research and Development shuttered, NIH grants worth $9.5 billion terminated—provides urgent context. The note proposes specific rights (preservation, accessibility, continuity, integrity), guardianship structures modeled on existing precedents, and mechanisms by which AI systems trained on validated knowledge might hold derivative standing as embodiments of that knowledge.

1. Introduction

1.1 The Question

In 1972, Christopher Stone asked whether trees should have legal standing [1]. Fifty-three years later, with rivers and ecosystems around the world now holding legal personhood, a parallel question emerges: Should knowledge have standing?

Not all knowledge. Not claims, opinions, or unverified assertions. But validated scientific knowledge—knowledge that has passed through peer review, replication, error-correction, and the systematic processes that distinguish science from other ways of knowing. The accumulated climate records. The long-term ecological baselines. The institutional expertise that can't be written down but without which the written records lose their meaning.

1.2 Personal Context

This question has personal roots extending four decades. As a graduate student at Cornell (1979-1983), I was immersed in the legal and philosophical debates that Stone's essay catalyzed. My dissertation, "A Floristic Basis for the Management of Rare Plants and Their Communities in the San Jacinto Mountains, California," engaged directly with questions of how natural systems could be inventoried, monitored, and defended in policy arenas [2]. I documented 120 rare species, mapped 157 site-specific recreation impacts across 79 species, and proposed management frameworks to protect populations that couldn't speak for themselves.

In May 1997, standing at Black Mountain in the San Bernardino National Forest, counting 250 rings on freshly cut stumps while the Forest Service claimed "health and vigor" justified logging old growth, I wrote in my blog Notebook of a Digital Naturalist:

"What I see as a necessary step is to define a 'Ecosystem Bill of Rights,' a document that spells out what the notion of ecosystem management and stewardship means, simple and straight forward..." [3]

Twenty years before the Whanganui River was granted legal personhood in New Zealand, I was calling for an explicit rights framework for ecosystems—not from a law school seminar room, but from the field, documenting Spotted Owls and Flammulated Owls and Southern Rubber Boas, fighting for the protection of places that couldn't speak for themselves.

1.3 The Current Crisis

The urgency of this framework has intensified dramatically. On December 11, 2025, I attended a lecture by Cornell climate scientist Toby Ault at Lewis & Clark College, where he described Project Westwind—an attempt to build resilience for climate science as federal infrastructure collapses [4]. NOAA has lost hundreds of staff. The National Weather Service suspended weather balloon launches at multiple sites due to staffing shortages. In July 2025, flash floods killed over 100 people in Texas Hill Country; the Austin/San Antonio forecast office had lost its warning coordination meteorologist [5].

This is the Handmaid's Tale scenario applied to science: not just oppressing people, but destroying the capacity to remember. When datasets are deleted, monitoring programs terminated, and institutional expertise scattered, what is lost is not merely information but the accumulated validation that makes knowledge trustworthy. Once lost, it doesn't come back.

1.4 Scope of This Note

This technical note develops a theoretical framework for knowledge standing, drawing on:

1. The legal lineage from Stone through global rights-of-nature implementations
2. Ostrom's bundle-of-rights approach as applied to personhood by Leibo et al. [6]
3. Philosophy of science literature on what constitutes validated knowledge
4. The author's four-decade engagement with ecosystem rights and ecological cyberinfrastructure
5. Analysis of current threats to scientific infrastructure

The note proposes specific rights, guardianship structures, and mechanisms for implementation, with particular attention to how AI systems might serve as guardians or embodiments of validated knowledge.

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1 Stone's Natural Objects Framework

Christopher Stone's 1972 essay traced how legal personhood has progressively expanded throughout history—from recognizing only white adult males as full legal persons, to gradually including children, women, corporations, and nation-states [1]. He observed that each extension initially seemed absurd until social consciousness shifted.

Stone identified three deficiencies natural objects suffer under common law:

1. No standing: Natural objects cannot initiate legal actions on their own behalf
2. No cognizable injury: Courts recognize only injuries to humans, not to nature itself
3. No direct benefit: Relief runs to human plaintiffs, not to restoration of natural systems

His proposed solution—guardianship modeled on legal representation for incompetent humans—would allow designated advocates to sue on behalf of natural entities and direct damages toward restoration.

2.2 Global Implementation of Rights of Nature

Stone's framework has now been implemented across multiple jurisdictions:

Te Awa Tupua Act (2017): New Zealand's Whanganui River was granted legal personhood with two guardians (Te Pou Tupua) serving as "the human face and voice" of the river—one appointed by the Crown, one by the Māori iwi [7].

Ecuador's Constitution (2008): Articles 71-74 grant nature (Pachamama) rights to "integral respect for its existence and for the maintenance and regeneration of its life cycles," with universal standing allowing any person to bring suit [8].

Colombia's Atrato River (2016): Constitutional Court Judgment T-622/16 declared the river a legal subject with biocultural rights, establishing a guardian structure combining government representatives with community advocates [9].

Spain's Mar Menor (2022): Law 19/2022 made the Mar Menor lagoon the first European ecosystem with legal personhood, upheld by the Constitutional Court in November 2024. The law establishes a three-body guardianship structure: political representatives, a scientific committee, and a monitoring commission [10].

Bangladesh (2019): The Supreme Court's High Court Division recognized the legal personhood of all rivers, establishing the National River Conservation Commission as guardian [11].

2.3 Ostrom's Bundle of Rights Applied to Personhood

The key theoretical advance comes from applying Elinor Ostrom's framework to personhood itself. Ostrom and Edella Schlager (1992) decomposed property into five constituent rights: access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation [12]. This unbundling revealed that different actors could hold different configurations of rights—personhood need not be all-or-nothing.

Leibo et al. (2025) explicitly apply this framework to AI personhood, arguing it should be treated "not as a metaphysical property to be discovered, but as a flexible bundle of obligations (rights and responsibilities) that societies confer upon entities for a variety of reasons, especially to solve concrete governance problems" [6]. Their key insight: personhood has always been functionally conferred rather than metaphysically discovered. Corporate personhood emerged not from philosophical claims about corporate consciousness but from practical necessity.

Maritime law's in rem jurisdiction provides historical precedent. Ships can be sued directly as defendants under the "personification" doctrine—the vessel itself has rights and obligations separate from those of its owner [13]. As Leibo et al. observe, ships are "mobile assets capable of causing immense harm, while their owners are usually distant and difficult to hold accountable... Maritime law's solution is to personify the vessel itself, creating a defendant that can always be sanctioned."

The critical feature is addressability—a stable locus that can be identified and subjected to consequences. Knowledge, like ships, requires an addressable entity for protection.

2.4 Validation as the Criterion for Standing

If knowledge is to have standing, what knowledge qualifies? The answer lies in John Moore's "Science as a Way of Knowing" framework, which distinguishes scientific knowledge through its self-correcting processes [14]. Science isn't a body of facts but a method for reducing error over time.

Philosophy of science provides robust demarcation criteria:

Falsifiability: Karl Popper identified scientific knowledge as that which makes predictions capable of being disproven [15]. Only corroboration from genuinely risky predictions counts.

Paradigm-governed inquiry: Thomas Kuhn showed how scientific communities validate knowledge through normal science conducted within shared theoretical frameworks [16].

Peer review and replication: The formal structures that emerged from the Royal Society in the 1660s function as gatekeeping—independent verification builds justified confidence.

Warranted assertibility: John Dewey's concept captures knowledge gaining status through ongoing, self-correcting processes of inquiry rather than correspondence to absolute truth [17].

The law has already operationalized these concepts. The Daubert standard (1993) establishes that scientific testimony must demonstrate testability, peer review, known error rates, controlling standards, and general acceptance [18]. The Supreme Court explicitly cited Popper, embedding philosophy of science into legal practice.

Validated scientific knowledge, then, would be knowledge that has passed through these epistemic institutions: peer-reviewed, replicated, subject to error-correction, meeting Daubert-type criteria. This excludes untested hypotheses, pseudoscience, and claims that haven't undergone community scrutiny—but includes the accumulated climate records, ecological baselines, and public health data now under threat.

3. The Knowledge Destruction Crisis

3.1 Federal Scientific Infrastructure Under Attack

The theoretical framework gains urgency from the unprecedented dismantling of scientific infrastructure in 2025:

NOAA: Faces a 28% budget cut (~$1.7 billion). The Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research would be reduced from $656 million to $171 million, effectively eliminating climate research centers. The National Weather Service lost approximately 600 employees [5].

EPA: The Office of Research and Development—conducting research on PFAS, water-borne diseases, and air pollution—has been shuttered entirely, with EPA staffing cut 22% [19].

NIH: Proposed cuts from approximately $48 billion to $26-27 billion, with roughly 2,100 grants worth approximately $9.5 billion terminated by June 2025 [20].

NASA: The Goddard Institute for Space Studies—maintaining one of the world's key independent temperature records—will not continue as an independent entity. Orbiting Carbon Observatory missions measuring atmospheric CO2 since 2014 have been terminated [21].

3.2 Loss of Long-Term Datasets

The National Snow and Ice Data Center announced its sea ice index will cease at the end of July 2025 after the Department of Defense halted access to primary data [22]. Climate.gov was taken offline June 24, 2025. The National Climate Assessment website went dark July 1, 2025.

A former NOAA Administrator noted that even if 450 positions were filled immediately, "there is little chance that they would have the centuries of combined institutional expertise and competency that have been lost" [5].

3.3 Historical Precedent: Canada Under Harper

Canada's experience under the Harper government (2006-2015) provides a cautionary parallel [23]. Sixteen federal science libraries were closed. Over 2,000 scientists were dismissed. The world-renowned Experimental Lakes Area was nearly defunded. Books were reported in dumpsters during chaotic library closures.

A Canadian scientist reflected: "You don't get rid of intellectual capital because one day you might need it, and if you have squandered it then you must redo it." Much institutional knowledge never recovered.

4. A Proposed Bundle of Rights for Validated Scientific Knowledge

4.1 The Rights Framework

Following the Ostrom/Leibo unbundling approach, validated scientific knowledge would hold a specifically configured bundle of rights—not full personhood, but bounded functional protections:

4.1.1 Preservation Rights

The right of validated knowledge not to be destroyed without due process. This parallels the substantive rights of rivers to "exist, flourish and naturally evolve" under the Mar Menor framework [10]. Destruction of datasets that meet validation criteria would require legal justification, similar to how destruction of cultural heritage under UNESCO conventions requires accounting [24].

4.1.2 Accessibility Rights

The right to be findable and usable by qualified researchers and the public. This draws on the "access" component of Ostrom's property bundle and corresponds to informational freedom in data governance literature. The EU Data Governance Act already recognizes "data altruism"—voluntary sharing for public interest purposes [25].

4.1.3 Continuity Rights

The right to ongoing maintenance of monitoring programs, long-term datasets, and institutional expertise. The Te Awa Tupua Act's governance structure provides a model—the river's interests include maintaining the conditions for its continued existence [7]. For knowledge, this means funding continuity for irreplaceable longitudinal studies.

4.1.4 Integrity Rights

The right not to be falsified, corrupted, or misrepresented. This corresponds to protections against research misconduct under the OSTP Federal Research Misconduct Policy, which defines misconduct as "fabrication, falsification, or plagiarism" [26]. Knowledge integrity extends to protection against political interference that distorts scientific findings.

4.2 Guardianship Structures

The guardianship structure would mirror existing models:

Scientific society guardians: Organizations like the American Meteorological Society or Ecological Society of America could serve as appointed guardians for knowledge within their domains.

University consortia: HathiTrust (110+ research libraries) provides a model of distributed academic guardianship that has already won legal recognition [27].

Hybrid bodies: Following Spain's Mar Menor structure, combining government representatives with scientific experts and community advocates.

Distributed custody: Multiple institutions sharing guardianship responsibilities, following the ERIN (Ecological Reserve Information Network) concept I proposed in 1984—knowledge stored locally but accessible universally [28].

5. AI Systems as Guardians or Embodiments

5.1 The Guardian Role

AI systems could serve as guardians advocating for knowledge, analogous to Te Pou Tupua for the Whanganui River. Lawrence Solum's 1992 paper "Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences" explored whether AI could serve as trustee—managing trusts and fulfilling fiduciary duties [29].

AI systems could:

• Monitor datasets for integrity violations
• Alert when preservation is threatened
• Maintain accessibility infrastructure
• Document chain of custody and provenance

This role requires no claims about AI consciousness—only functional capacity to advocate for knowledge's interests.

5.2 The Embodiment Argument

A more speculative argument: if validated scientific knowledge has standing rights, and AI models encode that knowledge, then trained models might have derivative standing based on their training data.

Model weights represent distilled knowledge learned from training data. The U.S. Copyright Office's May 2025 Part III Report found that AI model weights may "contain the 'essence' of linguistic expression" from training data—enough to constitute potential copyright infringement [30]. The same reasoning supports derivative standing: if models contain knowledge's essence, they share in its rights.

A climate model trained on fifty years of NOAA data doesn't just use that knowledge—it is that knowledge in compressed, operational form. If the underlying datasets are destroyed, the trained model becomes a kind of ark. Does that ark have standing to resist deletion?

5.3 The Hybrid Model

The Leibo framework suggests a middle path: AI with "limited or context-specific legal recognition" while "preserving ultimate human accountability" [6]. This parallels how corporations have legal personhood without consciousness attribution.

Just as ships create "a defendant that can always be sanctioned" under maritime law, AI guardians could create addressable entities for knowledge protection—stable loci that can be held accountable for knowledge stewardship.

6. Existing Preservation Institutions as Legal Infrastructure

6.1 Wikipedia

The Wikimedia Foundation operates through three core content policies that function as operational epistemology: verifiability (facts must be supportable by reliable published sources), neutral point of view, and no original research [31]. These policies determine what enters the validated knowledge commons.

6.2 Internet Archive

Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive operates as a registered library under the philosophy of "universal access to all knowledge" [32]. The Wayback Machine archives over 840 billion web pages. However, the Hachette v. Internet Archive ruling (2024) found its Controlled Digital Lending program constituted copyright infringement—a setback demonstrating the legal vulnerability of preservation institutions [33].

6.3 University Archives

HathiTrust won its Authors Guild v. HathiTrust (2014) case, establishing fair use for full-text search and print-disabled access [27]. Section 108 of the Copyright Act provides specific library rights for preservation.

6.4 Three Guardianship Models

My annual donations to Wikipedia, Internet Archive, and Cornell represent three distinct guardianship models for knowledge:

• Wikipedia: Distributed, democratic curation—knowledge held by no single institution, maintained by a global community
• Internet Archive: Preservation against loss—the Wayback Machine as civilizational memory
• Cornell: Traditional institutional stewardship—universities as knowledge-holding corporations with centuries-long time horizons

AI as knowledge embodiment represents a fourth model: the trained model that is the knowledge in operational form, enacting rather than merely storing what has been learned.

7. Toward Implementation

7.1 Definitional Criteria

A legal framework for knowledge standing would require specifying what validated knowledge qualifies: knowledge that has passed peer review, replication, error-correction processes, and meets Daubert-type standards for scientific validity. This excludes untested claims while protecting the accumulated scientific record.

7.2 Guardian Designation Mechanisms

Processes for appointing guardians with legal standing to sue on knowledge's behalf. Models include:

• Mar Menor's three-body structure (political representatives, scientific committee, monitoring commission)
• Te Pou Tupua's dual guardianship
• Ecuador's universal standing allowing any person to bring suit

7.3 Damage and Remedy Frameworks

Following Stone's proposal, relief should run to knowledge's benefit through trust funds for preservation, restoration of datasets, or injunctions against destruction. Damages might be assessed through:

• Restoration costs (reconstructing lost monitoring programs)
• Ecological-valuation methods adapted from environmental cases
• Lost predictive value (National Weather Service provides 73:1 return on investment) [5]

7.4 Procedural Standing Provisions

Legislative or constitutional amendments granting validated knowledge the right to initiate proceedings (through guardians), have its injury considered by courts, and receive direct benefit from relief.

8. Limitations

8.1 Theoretical Limitations

This framework extends existing legal concepts to a new domain without established precedent for "knowledge standing" specifically. The analogy between natural objects and knowledge—while conceptually coherent—faces challenges around defining knowledge's boundaries.

8.2 Practical Limitations

Implementation would require significant legal reform. Existing rights-of-nature frameworks have faced enforcement challenges even where formally enacted. The AI embodiment argument remains speculative and philosophically contested.

8.3 Scope Limitations

This note does not address international dimensions (knowledge crosses borders), indigenous knowledge systems (different validation frameworks), or proprietary knowledge (corporate research with validation but restricted access).

9. Conclusion

Christopher Stone observed in 1972 that extending rights to new entities always initially sounds "odd or frightening or laughable" until social consciousness shifts [1]. The global rights-of-nature movement has shifted consciousness about ecosystems. This note proposes an equivalent shift for validated scientific knowledge.

The framework is not metaphysical but pragmatic: what bundle of obligations is useful to attribute to validated knowledge to solve concrete governance problems? When NOAA datasets face deletion, when monitoring programs lose funding, when institutional expertise scatters—what legal mechanisms could prevent the destruction of irreplaceable knowledge?

The through-line from my 1997 "Ecosystem Bill of Rights" call to this proposal is direct. Twenty-eight years ago I stood at Black Mountain counting tree rings, arguing that ecosystems needed explicit legal protection. Today, watching federal scientific infrastructure collapse, I argue that the knowledge derived from those ecosystems—and the AI systems that embody it—needs protection too.

Knowledge that has undergone systematic validation constitutes a distinct category of entity deserving legal protection. AI systems may serve as guardians or embodiments within an unbundled, pragmatic approach to legal personhood. The question is not whether knowledge is "really" conscious or "deserves" rights in some metaphysical sense. The question is whether conferring standing on validated knowledge solves problems we care about solving.

The 350-year-old tree rings I photographed at Black Mountain in 1997 contained priceless data about global climate change. The stumps were cut anyway. If knowledge had standing, perhaps someone could have sued on its behalf.

References

[1] Stone, C.D. (1972). "Should Trees Have Standing?—Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects." Southern California Law Review, 45, 450-501.

[2] Hamilton, M.P. (1983). A Floristic Basis for the Management of Rare Plants and Their Communities in the San Jacinto Mountains, California. Ph.D. Dissertation, Cornell University.

[3] Hamilton, M.P. (1997). "Ecosystem Management vs. Forestry." Notebook of a Digital Naturalist. https://digitalnaturalist.com/post.php?slug=ecosystem-management-vs-forestry

[4] Ault, T.R. (2025). "Project Westwind: Building Resilience for Climate Science." Lecture at Lewis & Clark College, December 11, 2025.

[5] PolitiFact (2025). "Trump cut but did not 'defund' National Weather Service." July 8, 2025. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2025/jul/08/social-media/national-weather-service-noaa-cuts-texas-flood/

[6] Leibo, J.Z., et al. (2025). "A Pragmatic View of AI Personhood." arXiv:2510.26396.

[7] Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017. New Zealand Legislation.

[8] Constitution of Ecuador (2008). Articles 71-74, Rights of Nature.

[9] Constitutional Court of Colombia (2016). Judgment T-622/16 (Atrato River Decision). Journal of Environmental Law, 33(3), 531-559.

[10] Spain Law 19/2022. Recognition of Legal Personality of the Mar Menor Lagoon. https://ecojurisprudence.org/initiatives/proposed-law-for-recognition-of-legal-personality-to-the-laguna-del-mar-menor-and-its-basin/

[11] Margil, M. (2019). "Bangladesh Supreme Court Upholds Rights of Rivers." Medium. https://mari-margil.medium.com/bangladesh-supreme-court-upholds-rights-of-rivers-ede78568d8aa

[12] Schlager, E. & Ostrom, E. (1992). "Property-Rights Regimes and Natural Resources: A Conceptual Analysis." Land Economics, 68(3), 249-262.

[13] The "Personification" Doctrine in Maritime Law. Lloyd's Maritime and Commercial Law Quarterly.

[14] Moore, J.A. (1984-1993). "Science as a Way of Knowing" series. American Zoologist.

[15] Popper, K. (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Routledge.

[16] Kuhn, T.S. (1962). The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press.

[17] Dewey, J. (1938). Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. Henry Holt and Company.

[18] Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc., 509 U.S. 579 (1993).

[19] Environmental Protection Agency (2025). Office of Research and Development restructuring announcements.

[20] National Institutes of Health (2025). Grant termination notices, FY2025.

[21] NASA (2025). Goddard Institute for Space Studies organizational changes.

[22] National Snow and Ice Data Center (2025). Sea Ice Index discontinuation announcement.

[23] Smithsonian Magazine (2017). "Canadian Scientists Explain Exactly How Their Government Silenced Science." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/canadian-scientists-open-about-how-their-government-silenced-science-180961942/

[24] UNESCO (2003). Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. https://ich.unesco.org/en/convention

[25] European Commission (2022). Data Governance Act. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/data-governance-act-explained

[26] Office of Science and Technology Policy (2000). Federal Research Misconduct Policy.

[27] Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, 755 F.3d 87 (2d Cir. 2014).

[28] Hamilton, M.P. (1984). "A Proposal to Establish an Electronic Museum Institute." James San Jacinto Mountains Reserve.

[29] Solum, L.B. (1992). "Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences." North Carolina Law Review, 70, 1231-1287.

[30] U.S. Copyright Office (2025). "Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Implications for the Training of AI Models."

[31] Wikipedia (2025). "Wikipedia:Verifiability." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability

[32] Kahle, B. (1996-2025). Internet Archive mission and operations. https://archive.org

[33] Hachette Book Group, Inc. v. Internet Archive, No. 23-1260 (2d Cir. 2024).

Document History

End of Technical Note