Theory Of Legal Personhood

Présentation de l'éditeur: "This work offers a new theory of what it means to be a legal person and suggests that it is best understood as a cluster property. The book explores the origins of legal personhood, the issues afflicting a traditional understanding of the concept, and the numerous debates surrounding the topic."

This Element presents the notion of legal personhood, which is a foundational concept of Western law. It explores the theoretical and philosophical foundations of legal personhood, such as how legal personhood is defined and whether legal personhood is connected to personhood as a general notion. It also scrutinises particular categories of legal personhood. It first focuses on two classical categories: natural persons (human beings) and artificial persons (corporations). The discussions of natural persons also cover the developing legal status of children and individuals with disabilities. The Element also presents three emerging categories of legal personhood: animals, nature and natural objects, and AI systems. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

This edited work collates novel contributions on contemporary topics that are related to human rights. The essays address analytic-descriptive questions, such as what legal personality actually means, and normative questions, such as who or what should be recognised as a legal person. As is well-known among jurists, the law has a special conception of personhood: corporations are persons, whereas slaves have traditionally been considered property rather than persons. This odd state of affairs has not garnered the interest of legal theorists for a while and the theory of legal personhood has been a relatively peripheral topic in jurisprudence for at least 50 years. As readers will see, there have recently been many developments and debates that justify a theoretical investigation of this topic. Animal rights activists have been demanding that some animals be recognized as legal persons. The field of robotics has prompted questions about driverless cars: should they be granted a limited legal personality, so that the car itself would be responsible for damages? This book explores such concepts and touches on matters of bioethics, animal law and medical law. It includes matters of legal history and appeals to both legal scholars and philosophers, especially those with an interest in theories of law and the philosophy of law.

This volume showcases emerging interdisciplinary scholarship that captures the complex ways in which biological knowledge is testing the nature and structure of legal personhood. Key questions include: What do the new biosciences do to our social, cultural, and legal conceptions of personhood? How does our legal apparatus incorporate new legitimations from the emerging biosciences into its knowledge system? And what kind of ethical, socio-political, and scientific consequences are attached to the establishment of such new legalities? The book examines these problems by looking at materialities, the posthuman, and the relational in the (un)making of legalities. Themes and topics include postgenomic research, gene editing, neuroscience, epigenetics, precision medicine, regenerative medicine, reproductive technologies, border technologies, and theoretical debates in legal theory on the relationship between persons, property, and rights.

This book explores the legal conception of personhood in the context of contemporary challenges, such as the status of non-human animals, human-animal biological mixtures, cyborgisation of the human body, or developing technologies based on artificial autonomic agents. It reveals the humanistic assumptions underlying the legal approach to personhood and examines the extent to which they are undermined by current and imminent scientific and technological advances. Further, the book outlines an original conception of non-personal subjecthood so as to provide adequate normative solutions for the problematic status of sentient animals and other kinds of entities. Arguably, non-personal subjects of law should be regarded as holding one right, and only one right - the right to be taken into account.

This book explores the role of gender in the recognition of an individual’s legal capacity. It discusses the meaning of the right to legal capacity and its two core elements – legal personhood and legal agency. It then analyses historical and modern denials of personhood and agency experienced by women, disabled women, and gender minorities – for example, prohibitions from voting, limitations on contracting, loss of personhood upon marriage, and gender binary requirements leading to an inability to exercise legal capacity, among others. Using critical feminist, disability, and queer theory, this book also offers insights into the construction of legal personhood and its role as a predictor of power and privilege. The book identifies patterns of oppression through legal capacity denial in various jurisdictions and discusses situations in which modern law continues to enforce these denials. In addition, the book presents solutions: it identifies practices to learn from in various jurisdictions around the world – including both civil law and common law jurisdictions. It also uses case studies to illustrate the ways in which existing laws, policies and practices could be reformed. As such, the book offers both a novel contribution to the field of legal capacity law and a tool for creating change and helping to realise the right to legal capacity for all.

Personhood is considered at once a sign of legal-political status and of socio-cultural agency, synonymous with the rational individual, subject, or citizen. Yet, in an era of life-extending technologies, genetic engineering, corporate social responsibility, and smart technology, the definition of the person is neither benign nor uncontested. Boundaries that previously worked to secure our place in the social order are blurring as never before. What does it mean, then, to be a person in the twenty-first century? In Impersonations, Sheryl N. Hamilton uses five different kinds of persons - corporations, women, clones, computers, and celebrities - to discuss the instability of the concept of personhood and to examine some of the ways in which broader social anxieties are expressed in these case studies. She suggests that our investment in personhood is greater now than it has been for years, and that our ongoing struggle to define the term is evident in law and popular culture. Using a cultural studies of law approach, the author examines important issues such as whether the person is a gender-neutral concept based on individual rights, the relationship between personhood and the body, and whether persons can be property. Impersonations is a highly original study that brings together legal, philosophical, and cultural expressions of personhood to enliven current debates about our place in the world.

In recent years a set of challenging questions have arisen in relation to the status of animals; their treatment by human beings; their cognitive abilities; and the nature of their feelings, emotions, and capacity for suffering. This ground-breaking book draws from integrational semiology to investigate arguments around the rights of certain animals to be recognized as legal persons, thereby granting them many of the protections enjoyed by humans. In parallel with these debates, the question of the legal personality of artificial intelligence (AI) systems has moved to the forefront of legal debate, with entities such as robots, cyborgs, self-driving cars, and genetically engineered beings under consideration. Integrationism offers a framework within which the wider theoretical and practical issues can be understood. Law requires closure and categorical answers; integrationism is an open-ended form of inquiry that is seen as removed from particular controversies. This book argues that the two domains can be brought together in a challenging and productive synthesis. A much-needed resource to examine the heart of this fascinating debate and a must-read for anyone interested in semiology, linguistics, philosophy, ethics, and law. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.