Buildings, Rights, and Legal Worldviews in the Architecture of Public International Law

Contemporary debates in earth system governance, and its juridical domain, earth system law, increasingly emphasize the interdependence between humans, nature, and material systems. However, earth system law scholarship has not yet examined the built environment or the legal status of buildings. Legal scholarship conceptualized buildings as legal objects,
yet this position was never assessed in public international law or in relation to legal worldviews. This paper fills that gap by answering the question, considered within the context of earth system law: to what extent does public international law regulate rights related to buildings, and which legal worldviews underpin these regulatory regimes? It examines how buildings are positioned within the architecture of public international law, including whether and under what conditions different legal regimes treat buildings exclusively as legal objects, or whether they also approach, approximate, or exclude forms of legal subjectivity, and how such positions
vary across stages of the building lifecycle.
Situated within debates on earth system governance and earth system law, the paper approaches buildings as material components of interconnected social-ecological systems. Methodologically, this paper applies a two-fold analytical framework: (i) a classification of values, entities, and legal roles; and (ii) a legal-theoretical matrix distinguishing anthropocentric, ecocentric, and post-human legal worldviews, in a systematic content analysis of fifty public international law instruments - including human rights law, environmental law, and cultural
heritage law. By using the built environment as an analytical entry point, this paper contributes to the Architecture and Agency stream by examining how legal architectures structure recognition, exclusion, and differentiation between legal objects and legal subjects over time. In doing so, it advances earth system law by applying an analytical framework to assess how public
international law engages with material systems in the Anthropocene, including the conditions under which legal personhood is considered, transformed, or foreclosed.