Legal Personhood: Animals, Artificial Intelligence and the Unborn

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.

Contenu
Part I: Identifying the Legal Person.- 1. The Troublesome 'Person (Bartosz Brozek).- 2. Legal Persons as Abstractions (Ngaire Naffine).- 3. The Idea of Non-Personal Subjects of Law (Tomasz Pietrzykowski).- Part II Persons, Things and Rights.- 4. Why Things Can Hold Rights: Reconceptualizing the Legal Person (Visa Kurki).- 5. The Right of a House (Qing Xiangyang).- 6. Animals' Race Against Machines (Rafal Michalczak).- Part III: Humanity, Personhood and Bioethics.- 7. Person and Human Being in Bioethics and Law (Laura Palazzani).- 8. Detaching Personhood from Human Nature (Denis Franco Silva).- 9. Are Human Beings with Extreme Mental Disabilities and Animals Comparable? An Account on Personality (Ana Paula Barbosa-Fohrmann & Gustavo Augusto Ferreira Barreto).- 10. Is (Only) Sex Essential for Personhood? To Be 'Between' Male and Female under Polish Law (Agnieszka Bielska-Brodziak & Aneta Gawlik).- 11. Private Selves An Analysis of Legal Individualism (Susanna Lindroos-Hovinheimo).