The course will start focussing on new legal stipulations concerning the status of nature or of elements of nature from a comparative, international, and legal-theoretical (mainly Hohfeldian) perspective. The discussion will take its roots in the 2017 legal personification of the river Whanganui in New Zealand. Similar attempts (successful or not) have since taken place which all display legal specificities to be accounted for. This “rights of nature” trend raises a lot of fundamental and practical issues that will be analyzed in the course: such as the role of indigenous communities and the nature of biocultural rights, the theoretical coherence of legal ecocentrism, the modalities through which a natural fixture can exert standing. It is clear that granting elements of nature which have, by definition, a territorial reality raises issues with classical notions of property and sovereignty. We will discuss notions such as permanent sovereignty over natural resources and shared sovereignty over migratory resources to illustrate the complex relationship between sovereignty principles and conceptual frameworks open to alternative forms of nature’s legal autonomy. Many implications follow in the domains of ocean-law and space-law for example, leading to the discussion of transnational commons or public trust doctrines. Finally, the course will probe our “natural” legal conceptions, i.e. our spontaneous ways of conceiving some coherent legal statuses and expressing legally coherent reasoning with respect to natural phenomena in the context of climate change (one main example will be taken from the international status of icebergs).