The event takes place every first Thursday of the month during the semester from September through December and from February through June and is open to PhD students at the Lucerne School of Design, Film and Art (HSLU), the National Institute of Design (NID), and other interested guests and PhD students from other universities.
Veronica Pecile
Beyond the Rights of Nature: Law, Property, and the Making of the Natural World
Thursday, April 2nd, 2026
12:00 - 13:15 (CET / Central Europe)
3:30 pm - 4:45 pm (IST / India)
In this talk, Veronica Pecile explores how nature is constructed through law, focusing on the legal forms that organise human relations with the natural world. In recent years, rivers, forests, and other natural entities have increasingly been granted legal personhood through instruments such as the rights of nature. While often presented as pathways towards ecological justice, these developments do not necessarily challenge the hierarchical and extractive relations between humans and the natural world that underpin capitalist modernity. We will reflect on law as an infrastructure shaping social and environmental dynamics and explore how it can help rethink human–nonhuman relations beyond the paradigm of profit, particularly through alternative forms of ownership such as the commons. By integrating environmental and social justice concerns, this perspective on law may also provide tools for eco-design practices attentive to socio-ecological issues.
Dr. Veronica Pecile is a socio-legal researcher currently working at the intersection of law and ecology. Her research examines how nature is constructed through legal techniques, with particular attention to how different regimes of ownership shape relations between humans and the natural world. Her earlier work focused on the commons as a legal alternative to private property practiced by social movements after the 2008 economic crisis. She holds a PhD in Law and Social Sciences from EHESS in Paris and has held postdoctoral positions at Harvard Law School, the Collegium Helveticum at ETH Zurich, the Swiss Institute in Rome, and LUMSA University.
If you have any questions regarding the lecture series or the PhD programme please share them by mail to
esi@hslu.ch.
