In this paper, we identify the way in which various forms of legal personhood can be differentiated from one another by comparing these entities with a—not too farfetched—hypothetical situation in ...which intelligence spontaneously evolves (i.e. without human design) within the internet: spontaneous intelligence (“SI”). In these terms, we consider the challenges that may arise where SI as an entity: has no owner, no designer, and no controller; has evolved into existence as a non-human created intelligence; is autonomous; has no physical form; and, although it exists around the world, exists in no particular jurisdiction. Based on this refined notion of SI, we consider issues related to the recognition of such an entity’s legal personhood. By briefly exploring the attribution of legal personality to various entities—including, humans, corporations, artificial intelligence (“AI”) (in various forms) and higher forms of animal life—we differentiate SI from these other forms of intelligence whilst illustrating it shares most characteristics with human intelligence and not, as may intuitively be thought, with various forms of AI. After critically evaluating the classification of these various forms of intelligence, we briefly suggest some ramifications of these differences and suggest that the approach adopted may assist in drawing more effective boundaries between the entities that are already recognised as legal persons, as well as between sub-categories of entities, such as various forms of AI.
Since Roman law, the category of the legal person has been the most relevant legal category, allowing humans and entities to act within the law and enter into legal relations. The legal system does ...not consider nonhuman animals as legal persons but as property or as sentient beings regulated by the rules of property. Throughout history, there have been different concepts of the legal person, and some are still relevant today. This article examines four traditional concepts of legal personhood, arguing that nonhuman animals can be considered persons according to each concept. The article reaches three main conclusions. First, the legal person is not the same as the human. Second, the debate between the equivalence and the subset views poses a dilemma between a revolution or the reform of animals’ legal status. Third, an ecumenical defense of animal legal personhood may benefit animals as it supports animal persons according to any of the traditional concepts of legal personhood.
O presente artigo busca desenvolver considerações críticas acerca das atuais propostas relativas à subjetivação ou atribuição de personalidade jurídica a entes não humanos, tais como animais ou ...mecanismos dotados de inteligência artificial. Para esse propósito, parte-se de alguns pressupostos fundamentais da doutrina clássica sobre a personalidade em sentido jurídico, em particular a constatação de que a personificação de certo ente não se confunde com um incremento de tutela jurídica sobre ele, bem como o entendimento de que a personificação apenas se justifica quando necessária ao cumprimento de finalidades juridicamente relevantes e quando amparada minimamente na realidade social. Ao final, analisa-se, com maior detalhamento, o caso dos mecanismos inteligentes, para se concluir que as propostas de atribuição de personalidade jurídica a eles buscam, na verdade, resolver problemas de outra natureza, a saber: de responsabilidade civil. A todo tempo, as questões são analisadas em cotejo com a tutela da pessoa humana, sobretudo nos aspectos em que as propostas criticadas põem em risco, em alguma medida, a centralidade da dignidade humana como valor máximo do ordenamento constitucional brasileiro.
By considering the death of the disability activist Engracia Figueroa as the consequence of her wheelchair being damaged by an airline, this article asks whether law could accommodate a definition of ...legal personhood that encompasses the possibility of bodies augmented by prosthetics, technology, and mobility aids. The use of mobility aids by disabled people and the role of prosthetic penises in so-called ‘gender fraud’ cases offer two useful provocations to consider the ways in which legal personhood, if defined as largely mapping on to an ideal, normative body, is becoming an increasingly inadequate legal concept in the modern age. Drawing on the work of Donna Haraway and the figure of the cyborg, this article argues that a more protean, flexible, and fluctuating understanding of legal personhood would offer both a more accurate and utopian conception of the body in law than the current essentialist approach found in a number of legal areas and particularly in English criminal law.
Buried within the everyday deployment of business vehicles by Indigenous governments as a seemingly neutral way to pursue economic development are also legal notions of corporate personhood and ...representation. While it is occasionally suggested that corporate law is itself part of the problem of colonialism, the idiomatic notions of “representation,” “legal personhood,” and “business as neutral” form an opaque curtain that hides colonizing tendencies within the legal structures used by Indigenous peoples. This article explores these colonial tendencies at play in Canadian corporate law, showing how corporate law’s deployment of the “legal person” sits at odds with Indigenous juridical orders.
The concept of artificial intelligence is not new nor is the notion that it should be granted legal protections given its influence on human activity. What is new, on a relative scale, is the notion ...that artificial intelligence can possess citizenship—a concept reserved only for humans, as it presupposes the idea of possessing civil duties and protections. Where there are several decades’ worth of writing on the concept of the legal status of computational artificial artefacts in the USA and elsewhere, it is surprising that law makers internationally have come to a standstill to protect our silicon brainchildren. In this essay, it will be assumed that future artificial entities, such as Sophia the Robot, will be granted citizenship on an international scale. With this assumption, an analysis of rights will be made with respect to the needs of a non-biological intelligence possessing legal and civic duties akin to those possessed by humanity today. This essay does not present a full set of rights for artificial intelligence—instead, it aims to provide international jurisprudence evidence
aliunde ab extra de lege lata
for any future measures made to protect non-biological intelligence.
To what extent, if any, should the law protect sentient artificial intelligence (that is, AI that can feel pleasure or pain)? Here we surveyed United States adults (
= 1,061) on their views regarding ...granting 1) general legal protection, 2) legal personhood, and 3) standing to bring forth a lawsuit, with respect to sentient AI and eight other groups: humans in the jurisdiction, humans outside the jurisdiction, corporations, unions, non-human animals, the environment, humans living in the near future, and humans living in the far future. Roughly one-third of participants endorsed granting personhood and standing to sentient AI (assuming its existence) in at least some cases, the lowest of any group surveyed on, and rated the desired level of protection for sentient AI as lower than all groups other than corporations. We further investigated and observed political differences in responses; liberals were more likely to endorse legal protection and personhood for sentient AI than conservatives. Taken together, these results suggest that laypeople are not by-and-large in favor of granting legal protection to AI, and that the ordinary conception of legal status, similar to codified legal doctrine, is not based on a mere capacity to feel pleasure and pain. At the same time, the observed political differences suggest that previous literature regarding political differences in empathy and moral circle expansion apply to artificially intelligent systems and extend partially, though not entirely, to legal consideration, as well.
The so-called ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ cases have been provoked by people’s desires to make their own determinations about what personal information is accessible online to others (and when, and how) ...in a world of data permanence. Legally at stake is how personhood is defined and defended. Thus far, European law has primarily concerned itself with the delisting of ‘data subjects’ from search results and the deletion or anonymization of personal information from and by search engine operators. As a result, personhood has fallen into a kind of legislative void
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I argue that this void is engendered by an old friction between the traditional Western secularist cognitive models that have formed the skeleton of Western law and the pulsing flesh of living human subject creation that pushes back against it. At the very least, the digital immortality of our images, voices, words and more, are bringing forth a variety of aspects of our ‘person.’ Meanwhile, religious worldviews have long understood and made use of phenomenological ideas of human becoming and transcendence that are far more congruous with how—even modern secular—people make meaning of their lives and self-creation, and how they think of posthumous existence. Moving through and with some of the most recent thinking in philosophy, anthropology, and cognitive science, I will develop the argument that human subjectivity is not only impossible to limit to the body, but that a radicalized ecological view is the only one that can ‘save’ us.
Thirty years after the Hamburg seals case, autonomous rights for nature are no longer a merely utopian idea, but a social reality- and, in view of urgent ecological questions, a necessity. By ...expanding the stakeholder status in politics and law, ecosystems and animals are being empowered de lege lata to enforce their rights as non-human legal persons in the courts. I will first trace current trends in the juridical personification of non-human persons. I will then explore the potential for opening the concept of legal personhood to non-human legal persons from a theoretical perspective-considering the limitations of this approach as well. Finally, I will sketch out the current framework for legal action brought by non-human persons in German, European, and international law.
This article introduces a temporal approach to law as potentially innovative for socio-legal studies. It argues that bringing a focus on time into legal thought and practice is an important move for ...decentering the individual subject as conventionally conceived and for developing legal tools capable of recognising networks, ties and assemblages, and challenging the anthropocentric character of modern law. It frames climate change and the ecological crisis as a context for rethinking a number of fundamental legal forms, such as property and contract, as ways in which modern law can deal simultaneously with different temporalities – the present, an intergenerational time and a planetary time.
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