From Property to Personhood: A Post-Human Legal Framework for the Built Environment

The legal status of buildings is fragmented across multiple regimes, presumably anthropocentric. This fragmentation is creating a legal double standard that undermines the longevity of buildings. While new construction and heritage properties are frequently privileged, ordinary buildings remain legally under-protected, with owners often able to act in ways that would otherwise be legally accountable. Existing scholarship has occasionally identified such double standards within specific regimes, but they are rarely examined transversally or situated within broader jurisprudential debates. Although legal scholarship has begun to theorise post-human legalities, this has seldom extended to the built environment. This paper addresses this gap by advancing a new theoretical framework for researching the legal status of buildings, moving beyond the status as legal objects towards the recognition as potential legal subjects within an ecocentric jurisprudence. Drawing on post-human legal theory and critical environmental law, the framework repositions buildings as active, entangled participants in ecosystems, bearing intrinsic, relational, and instrumental values as “more-than-human” entities. Methodologically, this paper reflects a doctrinal review of academic literature to map current understandings of buildings in legal scholarship, identify the gaps in existing post-human legalities, and discuss the implications of extending rights to the built environment. The expected contribution is to articulate a paradigm shift capable of addressing a pressing legal vacuum with direct societal relevance, including challenges of planned obsolescence, negligent maintenance, premature demolition, and greenwashing. By reimagining the legal status of buildings to foreground longevity, this paper positions their recognition as rights-bearing entities as both an ethical and legal imperative for sustainability in the built and natural environments.