Should Knowledge Have Standing?

@techreport{hamilton2025should, author = {Hamilton, Michael P., Ph.D.}, title = {Should Knowledge Have Standing?}, institution = {Canemah Nature Laboratory}, year = {2025}, number = {CNL-TN-2025-017}, month = {december}, url = {https://canemah.org/archive/document.php?id=CNL-TN-2025-017}, 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.} }