This blog is a cross-posting from the Cambridge Core blogpost: Why are plants still mere ‘objects’ (or ‘things’) in private law? « Law# « Cambridge Core Blog

Original article: A New Leaf: Is It Time to De-objectify Plants in Private Law? | Transnational Environmental Law | Cambridge Core

There is an age-old tendency, certainly in the Western world, to uphold a sharp distinction in law between humans on one hand, and all other living beings on the other. One reflection of this tendency has been the relegation of all other living beings to mere ‘objects’ or ‘things’ in civil-law private law in many jurisdictions.

Charles Darwin, pictured here as a young boy holding a potted Lachenalia aloides, was greatly enamored with plants, writing in his autobiography that ‘It has always pleased me to exalt plants in the scale of organised beings’.

However, in the past decade or so, (non-human) animals have been ‘de-objectified’ in multiple civil codes. In our home country of the Netherlands for instance, the Dutch Civil Code (DCC) has stated since 2013 that ‘Animals are not things’ (Article 3:2a(1) DCC).

While this does not automatically benefit animals and/or humans greatly—animals can still be bought, sold, locked up, killed, eaten, kept in enormous methane emitting herds, etc.—it does, at the very least, attest to a citizenry’s expanding moral circle vis-à-vis our fellow animals, and could function to inspire future, more consequential changes. What is more, a separate law can, in conjunction with a ‘de-objectifying’ civil code provision, actually benefit (certain) animals and/or humans. In the Dutch Civil Code, ‘Provisions relating to things are applicable to animals’, except where the law or other considerations say differently (Article 3:2a(2) DCC). In this way, animals can be given more protection and consideration than a true ‘object’ (or ‘thing’) such as, say, a screwdriver, would deserve—either to benefit the animal directly, or to instrumentally benefit human society, or both. For instance, the 2011 Dutch Animals Act, which was drafted in conjunction with the aforementioned civil code provision, explicates in Article 1.3 that due to the sentience and the intrinsic value of animals, they should not be maltreated, as much as reasonably possible.

The proliferating legal development of de-objectifying animals in private law raises a question, we argue in our new article ‘A New Leaf: Is It Time to De-objectify Plants in Private Law’, published in Transnational Environmental Law. If animals, rightly in our view, are being distinguished from mere ‘objects’ or ‘things’ in civil-law private law, why aren’t plants?

After all, a child knows that plants—trees, shrubs, grasses, ferns, flowers, mosses—are alive, just as are animals. The German Civil Code de-objectifies animals and simply posits they are our ‘fellow creatures’ (Mitgeschöpfen); that is a bar certainly cleared by plants.

Besides being alive themselves, plants enable us and most other animals to be alive as well, given their photosynthetic creation of oxygen, their function as direct and indirect nourishment, their myriad important and even crucial roles in ecosystems, and their function as energy provider (both ‘fossil’ and fresh). Plants also improve our quality of life by, for instance, providing us with medicine, increasing our attention span, reducing our stress levels, and—not least—absorbing our excessive greenhouse gas emissions. The instrumental value of plants is immense.

In several jurisdictions. however, animals have been de-objectified based (in part) on their sentience, such as in the Netherlands (‘gevoel’), Belgium (‘gevoelsvermogen’), Portugal (‘sensibilidade’), and France (‘sensibilité’). One might argue that this particular bar is, in fact, too high for plants, and that de-objectification should thus not be in order.

But plants arguably are sentient too. This has been argued more and more by plant scientists, in the past decade particularly. Overcoming the condition that botanists call ‘plant blindness’, which is common in a great number of people and has been for a very long time, certain authors have endeavoured to demonstrate plant sentience. Plants have many senses; distinguishing light from dark, assessing gravity, and even—in some plants—possessing great sensitivity to touch. At least some plants can ‘remember’ and ‘learn’ certain things in relation to stimuli. Plants ‘sleep’ by closing their leaves and reducing their nocturnal activity. They can treat family members differently from competing species. They can communicate via a sort of chemical ‘language’, warning other plants of danger, or signaling attraction or repulsion. In their 2022 book Planta Sapiens, Calvo and Lawrence write that plants exhibit ‘adaptive, flexible, anticipatory, goal-directed behaviour’ and that they, like animals, ‘move through their environments, collecting information as they go’, ‘deploying their evolved toolkit of sensory abilities and behaviours as they interact with the living and inert world around them’.[1] As a subtitle for the book accompanying his fantastic 1995 BBC television series The Private Life of Plants, David Attenborough tellingly chose ‘A Natural History of Plant Behaviour’ (emphasis added).[2]

In short, we feel it is high time for serious deliberations, both in legal academia and in parliaments, on the de-objectification of plants in private law. It would at least symbolically reflect an evolved and grown-up understanding, on the part of the citizenry, of the special worth of vegetable forms of non-human life. It could furthermore serve to safeguard the immense instrumental value of plants. Also, it could help plants themselves, for instance based on a notion of their intrinsic value. Parallel to the various domestic Animal Acts already in place, a ‘Plants Act’ could be created, protecting (the instrumental value of) plants in general and/or (the instrumental value) of particular plants. This also offers an alternative to the Rights of Nature approach, which requires active advocates and which has some (possible) conceptual, philosophical, and/or practical drawbacks.

Read “A New Leaf: Is It Time to De-objectify Plants in Private Law?”, a new open access article in Transnational Environmental Law.

[1] P. Calvo & N. Lawrence, Planta Sapiens: Unmasking Plant Intelligence (The Bridge Street Press, 2022),

p. 169.

[2] D. Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants: ANatural History of Plant Behaviour (Princeton University

Press, 1995).