ERASED
Drewes Farms Partnership v. City of Toledo (Lake Erie Bill of Rights)
441 F. Supp. 3d 551 (N.D. Ohio 2020) · 2020
Toledo's voters made Lake Erie a person. A federal judge unmade it the next year.
“LEBOR's authors failed to make hard choices regarding the appropriate balance between environmental protection and economic activity. Instead, they employed language that sounds powerful but has no practical meaning.”
The Ruling
In February 2019, 61% of Toledo voters approved the Lake Erie Bill of Rights (LEBOR), amending the city charter to grant the lake and its watershed the right to 'exist, flourish, and naturally evolve' and granting Toledo residents standing to enforce those rights. Drewes Farms Partnership sued the day after the election; the State of Ohio joined. On 27 February 2020, Judge Jack Zouhary of the Northern District of Ohio struck down LEBOR in its entirety, holding it unconstitutionally vague and ultra vires of municipal authority.
The Personhood Argument Not Made
Lake Erie is the indispensable American case because the denial is the doctrine. Toledo did not ask for a metaphor; it enacted a statute, voted by the polity that drinks the lake. The federal court's response — that 'exist and flourish' is too vague to enforce — would, if applied consistently, void most of the Bill of Rights. The court did not say that an ecosystem cannot be a person; it said that a city cannot make one. That is a sovereignty ruling dressed as a vagueness ruling, and it confines U.S. rights-of-nature jurisdiction to tribal land and federal action.
The Execution Gap Created
In 2014, half a million Toledo residents lost potable water for three days because of cyanobacteria blooms fed by agricultural phosphorus from the Maumee watershed. LEBOR was the political response. Six years later, agricultural runoff into the western basin remains essentially unregulated; Ohio's voluntary H2Ohio program offsets perhaps a fraction of the load. The personhood claim was struck before a single farm changed practice.
Primary sources & research
Related cases
Part of The Personhood Prism, the companion to The Execution Gap by Thomas William Hornig. See all personhood cases →