Field dialogue 7: Courts of the Living — Law Students as Truth-Seekers for the More-than-Human
Snapshots from a living field — surfacing stories, practices, and insights in the evolving work of engaging the More-than-Human. (For the full version of this Field Dialogue, consisting of an audio track & written synthesis, go to the Substack of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox)
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🌿 Field Dialogue 7: Courts of the Living — Law Students as Truth-Seekers for the More-than-Human
In India, the work of the organization Courts of the Living and its first national competition for law students is testing how a legal system would have to change to hear the more-than-human.
A legal system decides who may bring a claim, what counts as evidence, and whose interests a court is bound to weigh. Courts of the Living, a non-profit organization based in India, begins from the view that these rules were built for a narrow part of humanity and leave no room for the claims of ecosystems and animals. It works on that gap through a podcast, advocacy, a project that rewrites landmark judgments, and, in 2026, its first national competition for law students, launched together with Agami and NALSAR University of Law, a leading Indian law school. Over 50 teams of three students each are documenting an ecological conflict near their own campus; the 16 teams that advance will then apply their skills to a larger case rooted in the Sundarbans, the mangrove delta shared by India and Bangladesh.
In this seventh Field Dialogue, we spoke with Atreyo Banerjee and Shardha Rajam. Atreyo leads Praani, an initiative at Agami, an Indian organization that works to empower ideas that serve justice; Praani works on bringing ecological wellbeing and everyday coexistence into justice systems. He also teaches climate law and multispecies justice, the field that asks what justice would mean for all species, at Indian law schools. Shardha, also a lawyer, founded Courts of the Living and hosts its podcast. The conversation took place at the end of October 2026, while the second stage of the competition was under way, and moves across four territories:
- What Courts of the Living is, how its work began, and the festival it organized in late 2025 in Jaipur, Rajasthan, in which an auditorium was turned into courtrooms;
- Why the organization chose a competition, how law schools have received it, and how it runs;
- Where the first edition of the competition is anchored, and what the finals in the city of Kolkata are being designed to do;
- What the work is meant to set in motion in Indian law schools and across the region.
Why law, and what Courts of the Living does
In a legal dispute, only a recognized party can bring a claim, present evidence, and have its interests weighed by a court. Across most of the world those parties are people and legal entities such as companies. Courts of the Living starts from the question of what changes when more-than-human beings, such as ecosystems and animals, are heard in that process as well.
A legal system built for a few.
Atreyo describes law as a creative craft. Lawyers find new ways to argue about evidence, about standing (the right to bring a case before a court), and about the shape of an argument, and some of what legal reasoning has produced has been emancipatory. Yet the system is exclusive by design. It was built for humans, and within humanity for a narrow class of elite, wealthy, property-owning people, whom the law serves well. Atreyo saw this directly in his own practice. As a result the system has no capacity to respond to the concerns of ecosystems and animals, charismatic or not. Courts of the Living was founded on the question of what a legal system able to hear and answer them would look like.
Earth law already exists.
Courts of the Living did not invent the idea that nature can hold standing in law. Earth law and the rights of nature have been developing in other countries for years: Ecuador wrote rights of nature into its constitution in 2008, and in 2017 New Zealand gave the Whanganui River the status of a legal person. In India the closest parallel arose along a different path.
In March 2017 the High Court of Uttarakhand, a Himalayan state, declared the Ganga and Yamuna rivers legal persons. The ruling came out of a public interest lawsuit about illegal construction along the Ganga and the government’s failure to set up a body to manage the river, and the court presented it as an extraordinary measure to stop the rivers’ decline. No rights of nature movement comparable to those in Ecuador or New Zealand stood behind it. The Supreme Court of India stayed that ruling in July of the same year. Courts of the Living works in this context, from an Indian and South Asian base, with law students as its main point of entry.
A South Asian frame.
Rooted in India, the organization chose to work from a South Asian perspective, because the ecological problems it cares about cross national borders that Atreyo calls artificial. A recent example is a group of elephants stranded on the Bangladeshi side of the border between the two countries. Their migration corridor runs through eastern India and Bangladesh, a fence now cuts across it, and no law addresses what happens to migrating elephants.
Atreyo contrasts this with the attention citizenship law receives in India. Who counts as a citizen is a contested legal and political matter there, decided through statutes, registers, and special tribunals. In Assam, a state bordering Bangladesh, tribunals decide whether people are foreigners, and the status of many people depends on them; Atreyo worked on these tribunals earlier in his career.
Why engage the law at all.
Ecological and animal protection movements often postpone the law, planning to get to it later and putting their energy into campaigning first. Atreyo argues for engaging it early, because “the law makes worlds”. Law defines who is what: who is a person, an owner, a citizen, a party to a case. It is also a place where competing claims about those definitions are argued out, which he calls a site of contestation.
The work day to day.
Shardha describes four strands of what Courts of the Living does.
Nurturing future lawyers. The first is supporting the next generation of lawyers, who will become litigators, judges, and magistrates. Its main vehicle is the competition described below, which is meant to run annually, each edition anchored in a bioregion, a region defined by natural features such as a river basin or a forest rather than by administrative borders. The first edition is under way now. It was built with ecologists, environmental scientists, and primatologists. Shardha stresses that law has failed to hear many human voices as well, among them women, formerly colonized peoples, and enslaved people. The competition asks students to treat voices the law has neglected, human or not, as serious considerations.
Rewriting judgments. The second is a shadow judgment rewriting initiative. A shadow judgment is a rewrite of an existing court ruling as it might have been written differently. Courts of the Living takes landmark Indian judgments on animal rights and environmental cases and rewrites them so that the animals, ecosystems, and other living circumstances the original ruling treated as background become parties with a stake in the outcome.
Advocacy. The third is advocacy. On the day of the conversation the organization released a public statement against draft rules on animal experimentation, which would govern how animals can be used in laboratories and how severe the experiments may be.
Knowledge resources. The fourth is a set of resources: the podcast, opinion pieces, and interviews.
From a law firm to the more-than-human
Most people who work with the more-than-human world did not start there. Many arrive from other careers, such as law, and struggle to see a route into this work while they still need to earn a living. Atreyo’s own route ran through law school, a litigation practice (arguing cases in court), a master’s course on climate, and a move to Agami.
A course that questioned the law.
He entered law school intending to join a law firm and earn well, which at the time he equated with success. In his early twenties he met a few professors whose courses questioned law itself: they asked whether it is designed to cause harm and to keep certain power structures in place, rather than treating it as neutral. That was a before-and-after moment, and he could no longer see the system in the same light.
Litigation, and a dissonance.
He then practised law for some time. In public debate in India the common concern is how many people lack legal aid, meaning free legal help for those who cannot afford a lawyer. The clients he worked for instead were wealthy people, for whom the law ran like a well-oiled machine. The gap between what he wanted to do with a law degree and what he was doing with it sent him back to the classroom for a master’s degree, carrying thoughts he did not yet have the political vocabulary to express.
Climate, then ecosystems.
In his master’s he took a course called Climate Justice in India. It presented climate change as the visible edge of several crises intersecting at once, often called the polycrisis. From there his attention moved outward. When a mountain was carved out for a highway, he wondered what the mountain was feeling. When mining went on along Indian rivers, he wondered who was speaking for the river. The beings that came into view were each more violated than the last, and he now works most closely on farmed animals in India. At every stage the grief about the present system grew, and at every stage he also found a drive to act.
Finding the stitch.
Agami is a not-for-profit organization that empowers ideas that serve justice. Its practice is to identify powerful and innovative ideas in law and justice and build communities of practice around them. Within Agami, Atreyo saw three things that could be joined together: a large network of justice makers, civil society organizations, and activists; his own legal training and knowledge of the legal system; and a wish he shares with Shardha to imagine a more liberatory world for more-than-human life.
The competition and the rest of the work grew out of stitching these together, after two years on a different mission within Agami. His belief in pedagogical interventions with younger students, educational experiences designed to change how students see, comes from the same before-and-after moment he experienced as a student.
A festival that flipped the courtroom
On 6 and 7 December 2025, Agami held its second Justicemakers Mela, a two-day gathering on law and justice innovation, in Jaipur, a city in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Courts of the Living took part with a courtroom experience, which Shardha describes as one of the starting points of the organization and as its first pilot: a trial run of what a courtroom looks like when more-than-human life is brought into it.
An auditorium turned inside out.
The aim was to flip the courtroom and take apart the elements of a court that people find intimidating and inaccessible, particularly when the parties are more-than-human. In a conventional courtroom the audience watches the lawyers. Here the people on stage were the contenders, who brought evidence about more-than-human life, and the audience sat as the judges. Four courtrooms were built, each with an evidence stand like the witness stand in a real court: a court of wildlife, a court of water, a court of fungal and microbial life, and a courtroom of radical legal possibilities. In each, practitioners who work closely on that theme were invited to stand at the evidence stand and presenzt their evidence.
The Court of Water.
In this court the practitioner was someone who restores mangroves in the Sundarbans, the bioregion shared between India and Bangladesh, and who works with the local community so that the water and rivers there can meander as they wish. His evidence was a set of objects, among them a fisherfolk’s net and the remains of a crab. When an audience member placed a hand on an object, a video began of a person from a Sundarbans village telling what that object means to them. Touching the net played a video of a fisherman, who spoke about how hard it has become to get access to fish, and about the relationships people had with fish before industrial fishing began.
From testimony to manifesto.
After hearing the testimonies in each court, audience members submitted theses toward a multispecies manifesto, a statement of demands that accounts for all these lives, their realities, and their claims to justice. They placed their demands on a large piece of fabric.
Why a competition
After staging a courtroom experience at the Mela, and while also running a podcast, Courts of the Living could have chosen a policy paper, a fellowship, or another event as its next step. Atreyo explains why it chose a competition for law students.
Recognition as a drive.
Something in the human psyche responds to winning and losing and to being recognized for effort. The organizers wanted a process that gives participants something to gain at every stage, so that they stay with it. The process is also a learning journey for young students, and it gives everyone who takes part a first experience of what more-than-human advocacy, the practice of speaking up for the interests of animals, ecosystems, and other beings, can look like today.
What the alternatives lacked.
The option of producing a policy paper raised the question of who would read and act on it. A fellowship risked becoming a passive experience. The organization’s theory of change is that the legal system itself needs help, because it cannot respond meaningfully to more-than-human life, so Courts of the Living brings its work to law schools, where the next generation of lawyers is trained. Although the competition is designed for law students, ecologists, storytellers, biologists, and other people from outside law surround every step of it.
Awards as the main material.
There will be a winning team and others, but Atreyo locates the real substance of the competition in how the awards are structured. Teams can for example be supported to start more-than-human advocacy inside their law schools, by something as modest as a reading group or a one-day academic symposium.
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Teams can also be supported to act outside their law schools, through legal awareness work and small advocacy measures, and the community around Courts of the Living can back this financially or in other ways. The first edition of the competition has drawn around 350 students. From these, the organizers hope to end up with an initial group of 70 to 80 students, across 30 to 40 law schools, whom Courts of the Living and Agami can work with more closely. And this group is meant to grow with each further edition of the competition.
How the competition has been received
Law students in India are unlikely to have been exposed to this framing in a classroom. Atreyo describes feeling anxious about how it would be received, and then being overwhelmed, in a positive sense, by the response.
The first-edition numbers.
A total of 115 teams, about 345 students, applied from around 50 law schools in 20 of India’s 36 states and union territories, the country’s administrative regions. About 72 percent of the participants are women. The competition has 33 institutional partners, organizations that back it, and about 100 individual collaborators and partners.
Where participation came from.
Some law schools sent more teams than others because the organizers had worked with many of them before and had existing relationships. Participation also came from many lesser-known law schools outside the large cities, alongside the schools ranked among the country’s top law schools, a ranking Atreyo calls arbitrary. He had specifically hoped for this breadth of participation, so it mattered to him personally.
A reframing among partners.
Practitioners working on ecological issues or more-than-human advocacy in India often do not see their work through a justice lens. The institutional partners received the competition’s reframing of that work very positively.
What the organizers want to do better.
Sixteen of India’s states and union territories are currently not represented in the competition, and of the thousands of law schools in the country, around 50 took part. Atreyo calls the competition a small drop in a massive ocean of work.
What the first stage showed.
As part of the application, each team submitted a video interview. Shardha reports that many of these were emotional, carrying anger, sorrow, and grief, and that some students recorded theirs outdoors, where dogs and other animals joined the call. Responses like these push the organizers to bring more of a critical legal perspective, one that examines how law serves power, and a critical animal rights perspective into the competition.
How the competition works
Teams of three law students from the same law school, at any year of study and with no need for a background in environmental law or ecology, can enter. The participants are undergraduates, since law in India is commonly studied as a first degree. As Atreyo describes it, the competition has three stages, each testing something different.
Stage one: curiosity and the ability to work together.
Teams recorded a video interview for the application. One question asked why they chose to work with the teammates they did. In India, social and cultural background often shapes who works with whom, and law schools reflect those realities, so the question probes whether a team came together because its members are friends from similar backgrounds or because they bring complementary skills. A second question asked what had personally moved them to apply, since everyone has had some encounter with more-than-human life and the body remembers it.
Stage two: the field dossier.
Atreyo’s starting premise is that justice is place-based: justice in the Netherlands differs from justice in India, and justice in Kolkata differs from justice in Bangalore. The 52 teams selected for this stage therefore start where they are. Within five to seven kilometres of their law school, each team documents a conflict of coexistence, a situation in which human interests and the lives or interests of more-than-human beings come into tension.
The dossier tests three things. The first is curiosity in action. The second is how far students widen the circle of who is involved in a conflict. A student might document a tree being cut down. Another might also notice that insects lay their eggs on certain trees, so that cutting the tree destroys those insect lives, which brings the insects into the conflict as affected beings. Under current law neither the tree nor the insects can bring a claim; the dossier tests what students notice, and not what the law recognizes. Atreyo points out that in legal systems the right to have a conflict recognized at all is itself a privilege, since not everyone can bring a conflict before a court.
The third is what the law says about the conflict. A conflict does not have to be illegal: cutting trees, culling animals, or polluting a river is often lawful in India, and sometimes the law itself permits it. Students set what they observed on the ground next to what the law provides and describe the distance between the two. They then consider how more-than-human advocacy could change what the law provides.
Stage three: from adversaries to collaborators.
The 16 teams that emerge from stage two will work together in the finals. They will agree on a set of facts about the case, argue only from facts they all accept, and leave contested facts unargued. This reverses how lawyers are trained. In most courtrooms the two sides are adversaries, and each side’s lawyer is expected to contest what the other asserts.
Atreyo points to a well-known Dutch climate case, in which the environmental organization Milieudefensie took an oil company to court, as an illustration of that training: when one side asserts something, the other is expected to deny it. In the finals, both sets of lawyers are tasked instead with finding the truth, as truth-seekers and not only as advocates for their clients. Shardha adds that the finals are a pilot of what an actual court of the living, a court able to hear more-than-human parties, could look like in India today, and which principles and tools it would use.
Finding conflicts in an urban setting
Many of the participating law schools sit in or near cities, where the more-than-human is often hidden by how the environment has been built. The question is how creative students can be within a radius of just a few kilometres.
Conflicts close to hand.
Atreyo sees a great deal of room for creativity. An earlier small-scale run of the exercise produced a documentation from an urban graveyard, where vines had grown and birds came, until the graveyard was beautified. Just outside his own house he could find at least three conflicts. A conflict does not have to involve a large resistance effort against the state, which would put students in harm’s way. What the organizers look for is what is being missed. With 52 dossiers, they will receive 52 distinct stories of more-than-human conflict, large and small.
Constraints that shaped the design.
The participants are undergraduate students, and Atreyo cites deep questions of safety for young people working in the field in India, particularly since many law schools lie far from the centre of their city. After consulting an ethics committee, the organizers did not let students roam freely, which is why the search area is drawn in a relatively small radius around the campus. Atreyo and Shardha both teach at several universities, and they are confident that more-than-human conflicts exist inside the university grounds as well. Before settling on the design, they also spoke with professors at different law schools about what would be possible.
The Sundarbans and the finals in Kolkata
The main case that the finalists will argue in this first edition of the competition is set in the Sundarbans. The 16 teams in the finals will receive the problem statement, the written description of the case, at the end of December 2026, and meet in person in Kolkata, a large city in eastern India near the Sundarbans, in late February 2027 for the finals. Shardha describes the Sundarbans as the world’s largest mangrove forest, shared between India and Bangladesh and recognized as a Ramsar site, a wetland designated as internationally important under a global treaty.
A problem built from constituents.
Atreyo did not disclose the problem statement but described its structure. The case to be argued will contain several constituents, parties whose interests are at stake. Illustratively, these could include the forest, local wildlife species, a community, or plantations that once existed. Each team learns the needs and asks of every constituency. Since these will mostly be in conflict with each other, teams will not be told which one they must represent until the finals. A lawyer usually learns only the client’s brief, the instructions of the party they represent. Here the aim is to know the whole of the problem, in keeping with the idea of lawyers as truth-seekers. Institutional partners and individuals who know the region well will help shape the interests.
A cohort and not only a case.
Shardha notes that in law school competitions the attention usually goes mostly to the problem statement. In Courts of the Living the problem statement is one component of the finals, which are designed as a three-day gathering in Kolkata. The gathering is meant to build a cohort, a group that can rely on and collaborate with each other as they become practising lawyers. She names bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, a 1994 book on education as the practice of freedom, as an inspiration. The Sundarbans has a range of stakeholders as well as Indigenous religious and spiritual-ecological practices, which the organizers want to bring in, either as elements of the problem or as the ethics that guide the gathering.
How the finals are being designed.
A set of process partners who specialize in dispute resolution and in working with conflict are designing what happens during the finals in Kolkata. Among them are Land Conflict Watch, an independent network of researchers documenting land and natural resource disputes across India, and SAMA, an online dispute resolution organization that offers mediation and arbitration outside the traditional court process.
Together with the organizers, these partners are deciding how collaboration is woven into the process and which elements of the finals stay competitive. At the time of the recording, at the end of October 2026, how legal arguments will work in the finals was still with the process committee, the group of partners making these decisions, and could not yet be shared.
What this makes possible beyond the competition
Alongside the main prizes for the winning team and the runner-up, selected teams can receive Living Practice Awards, which turn what they found in the field into action in that place, and Campus Commons Awards, for student-led initiatives within their law schools. There are also places for Emerging Practitioners, with six months of mentorship. Atreyo explains what these are meant to change.
More futures for a law student.
A young law student in India today sees only a few possibilities: litigation, a law firm, or a career in social justice such as human rights work. The competition aims to show how many more possibilities there are, and to plant seeds across the country, thereby fuelling a decentralized movement. Atreyo is open about the fact that the awards may have flaws in their design; the organizers will see how they work in practice once the finals in February 2027 are over.
Campus Commons and a precedent.
Law students in India tend to be entrepreneurial and have historically done a lot with little, despite limited infrastructure and bureaucracy at many law schools. The precedent Atreyo has in mind is alternative dispute resolution societies, student groups that focus on settling disputes outside court through mediation and arbitration. They were uncommon in Indian law schools just five years ago and now exist in almost every one. His hope is that within five years every law school has a more-than-human justice society as well, and offers a lecture on more-than-human advocacy.
Living Practice.
A law student cannot argue in court before being licensed, but can do research, awareness work, and legal aid. Atreyo gives an example. In India, resident welfare societies are associations of residents in housing complexes, and they make rules of their own that residents must follow. A student team could host a one-day legal awareness camp on what such a society is and is not allowed to do about animals entering its buildings. If ten teams each hosted one, that would reach at least 100 to 150 people, and Courts of the Living would be able to support that work. Students also receive recognition, such as letters of recommendation, which Atreyo says are hard to obtain in India, and access to the opportunities that Courts of the Living and Agami can open up.
Collaborators looking at law differently.
People and organizations outside the law schools who serve as judges of the competition or as institutional collaborators are already starting to see law as a place to engage with in their own work on ecology and animals. If every collaborator were to start speaking about more-than-human advocacy in their own work, even in fields far removed from it today, Atreyo expects that to carry real weight.
Law schools and a regional moment
Atreyo was also asked whether law schools show an appetite to bring this subject into their curricula, the courses they teach.
From electives to institutional.
A few years ago, only select professors offered elective courses, credit courses, or short courses on the subject. It is now increasingly being institutionalized. Atreyo and his colleagues also mentor clinical initiatives at some law schools, programmes in which students work on real legal issues. The framing has shifted as well, from a broad environmental justice lens towards distinct strands: more-than-human justice, climate justice, justice for the river, each with its own nuance. Climate justice offers the precedent. A few years ago it was unfamiliar, and many law schools now teach climate compulsorily. Atreyo has no doubt that more-than-human justice will follow the same path.
Beyond India.
Shardha sees the same conversation playing out in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Bhutan, where law schools, students, and faculty are increasingly interested in closing the gap between more-than-human rights, multispecies justice, and the legal system as it stands. In the wider Asia-Pacific region, this interest is slowly building towards what she calls almost a crescendo, and the competition draws on that momentum and adds to it.
A closing note
Each part of this work asks people to meet something before they argue about it. At the Courts of the Living courtroom at the Justicemakers Mela in Jaipur, visitors put a hand on a fisherman’s net and heard a testimony before they were asked for a thesis toward a multispecies manifesto. In the first stage of the competition, participating teams are asked what has moved them before they are asked about the law. The field dossier asks them to stand in a place near their campus and document a conflict, and only then to read what the law says about it. The problem statement asks teams to learn the interests of every constituency before they find out which one they will carry into the room.
The same order runs through the finals: students who have first stood in a place and learned every side of a conflict are asked to establish the shared facts together before any of them argues a position. The competition tests whether lawyers who begin from an encounter, and from shared facts, argue differently from lawyers trained to open with their client’s brief. If they do, a legal system built for a few will have lawyers who start by hearing the more-than-human lives that share every place they work.
The competition can be followed at courtsoftheliving, which sets out its stages and awards and a public resources page. Courts of the Living is also on LinkedIn and Instagram, and its podcast is on Spotify.
Praani’s Field Notes at Agami discuss the wider work on multispecies justice. Agami’s work can be found at agami.in.
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