Abstract
The chapter argues that the traditional theories of legal personhood, which associate legal personhood with the holding of rights, are outdated and should be reassessed. Many modern theories of rights come into conflict with our convictions regarding who or what is a legal person. For instance, most jurists would agree that foetuses are not natural persons but new-born children are. However, if we apply the so-called interest theory of rights, we will note that foetuses hold various rights, such as rights against certain forms of abortion. If right-holding entails legal personality, then foetuses are already legal persons. On the other hand, if we apply the will theory, which associates right-holding with the power to control others’ duties, then infants do not hold any rights at all – and are consequently not legal persons.
This is why the chapter outlines an alternative theory of legal personhood. The main tenets of the theory are: (1) legal personality is not binary but rather a matter of degree, and (2) X’s legal personality involves primarily the endowment of X with incidents of legal personhood, much like ownership can be understood as consisting of separate but interconnected incidents. Rather than being a “solved” theoretical issue, the definition of legal personhood should occupy theorists more in the future.
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Notes
- 1.
There are some other formulations of this view as well. I will return to them later.
- 2.
People ex rel. Nonhuman Rights Project, Inc. v. Lavery, No. 518336, 2014 WL 680276 (N.Y. App. Div. Dec. 4, 2014).
- 3.
See also Bartosz Brożek’s article in this volume.
- 4.
Animals were only mentioned as things.
- 5.
The trifurcation is mentioned in Institutes which is the third part of Corpus Iuris Civilis. See (Birks et al. 1987).
- 6.
Doneau was not the first humanist jurist; he was preceded by Franciscus Connanus, who would start systematizing Roman law in a critical manner (Stein 1998, p. 122–123).
- 7.
Der Mensch wird, in so fern er gewisse Rechte in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft genießt, eine Person genannt. Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten (01.06.1794), Part I, Chap. 1, Sect. 1. See also (Hattenhauer 2011, p. 52–56).
- 8.
South Africa – a mixed jurisdiction – is an exception among Anglophone countries in that even jurists writing in English do use the phrases “legal subject” and “legal object” synonymously with respectively “person” and “thing”. See (Heaton 2015).
- 9.
For the influence of German, and especially Savigny’s, legal scholarship on English and American jurists, see (Hoeflich 1989); (Riesenfeld 1989); (Reimann 1989) and (Herget and Wallace 1986). Lars Björne has discussed the influence of Savigny’s personhood theory on Scandinavian legal scholarship (Björne 1998, p. 349–365).
- 10.
That Salmond was familiar with Savigny’s work can be seen at 347 f.
- 11.
For the rights theories of the nineteenth century, see (Simmonds 1998).
- 12.
There may be some counterexamples, such as dead creatures whose livers have been removed, but I take the point to be clear.
- 13.
“‘Natural person’ is the term used to refer to human beings’ legal status” (Berg 2007, p. 373).
- 14.
Die Rechtsfähigkeit des Menschen beginnt mit der Vollendung der Geburt. Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, § 1.
- 15.
Jeder Mensch hat angeborne, schon durch die Vernunft einleuchtende Rechte, und ist daher als eine Person zu betrachten. Austrian Civil Code (Allgemeines bürgerliches Gesetzbuch), § 16.
- 16.
The condition is explicitly recognised in the German Civil Code, as was noted above, as well as in Part 1, Section 1 of the Italian Civil Code. In Spanish law, the neonate must live for at least 24 h outside of the womb in order to be deemed a legal person (de las Heras Ballell 2010, p. 34). Regarding French law, see for example (Malaurie 1999, p. 27): “For natural persons, legal personality appears at birth […] and disappears at death […].“ ([P]our les personnes physiques, la personnalité juridique apparaît avec la naissance […] et disparaît avec la mort […].).
- 17.
An American landmark case, defining foetuses as nonpersons in the context of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, is Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 158 (1972).
- 18.
This is Neil MacCormick’s translation of the maxim (MacCormick 2007, p. 79).
- 19.
Jörg Neuner analyses anencephalic infants from the point of view of German law and concludes that they are “full legal persons” because the relevant organs – heart, lungs and brain – are still functioning (Neuner 2013, p. 651).
- 20.
- 21.
This is somewhat inspired by Neil MacCormick’s terminology in (MacCormick 2007, p. 77–99).
- 22.
Just a few of the scholars classifying slaves as legal nonpersons include (Fede 1992); (Kelsen 2006, p. 95); and (Wise 1996, p. 1). The Scandinavian realist Karl Olivecrona takes himself to be reporting the received opinion when noting that slaves lack legal personality (Olivecrona 1928, p. 38). See also for instance (Cairns 2012).
- 23.
- 24.
Many jurisdictions passed statutes abolishing coverture during the mid-19th century. See (Hoff-Wilson 1987). Married women’s legal status in the 19th-century US is depicted in (Shammas 1994). For a contemporary perspective on the active legal personality of women in a number of Commonwealth countries, see (Freeman 1990). A rather famous case is also In re Lockwood, where the US Supreme Court allowed for state courts to interpret “person” as excluding females. In re Lockwood 154 U.S. 116 (1894)
- 25.
I’ve omitted the “and-duty-bearers” part to improve readability.
- 26.
Some authors distinguish between legal and jural relations; I use the phrases interchangeably.
- 27.
- 28.
To be more precise, rights are claims that are accompanied by sundry immunities. I will disregard this detail in the present discussion, as it does not affect my argument in any way.
- 29.
Which entities can hold interest-theory rights is discussed more extensively in (Kramer 2001).
- 30.
This is a crude simplification of Kramer’s interest theory, but it preserves the features of the theory that are relevant for the argument.
- 31.
Kramer has a more extensive conception of interests, as he thinks that interests can be ascribed to, for instance, blades of grass, but the normative protections of sentient beings are according to him the primary group of such protections that can be called rights.
- 32.
See, for example, The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, drafted by Philip Low and signed on July 7, 2012 by conference participants of Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Human and non-Human Animals. It is available at http://fcmconference.org/img/CambridgeDeclarationOnConsciousness.pdf (accessed Nov 19, 2016).
- 33.
It is important to note that the sheer fact that a foetus or an animal is sentient does not tell us what kind of legal protections these beings should be accorded. Even if a third-trimester foetus is sentient, there may still be moral justifications for the termination of pregnancy during this phase of gestation.
- 34.
More generally regarding the legal protection of slaves in the antebellum South, see (Morris 1996, p. 182–208).
- 35.
Some adherents of the legal-persons-as-right-holders view recognise this; Richard Tur, for instance, notes that legal personhood is “a matter of degree” (Tur 1988, p. 122).
- 36.
Women have not been legal persons to a full extent at all times, either – for instance, in some jurisdictions, they have lacked the competence to dispose of their property, and in others the legal capacity to own property altogether.
- 37.
An interesting exception in this regard is Arthur Machen, who claims that legal personhood is not about right-holding at all but only about duty-bearing (Machen 1911, p. 263).
- 38.
The claim is also false with regard to rights, but not as glaringly false.
- 39.
It is rather interesting that in Political Liberalism John Rawls endorses the claim that “slaves are not counted as capable of having duties or obligations” (Rawls 2005, p. 33). However, on the same page he makes reference to Patterson’s book, which contains a wholesale rebuttal of that very claim. Hillel Steiner makes a similar claim: “self-enslavement […] cannot be incurred by a self-owner’s transferring (selling or donating) that right [to self-ownership], since such transfers entail that transferrors thereby acquire duties to their transferees, whereas slaves, as things wholly owned by others, must lack duties as well as rights” (Steiner 1994, p. 232f).
- 40.
“Typical” in that the jurisdiction has, for instance, preserved the born-alive rule: only children that are born alive are legal persons.
- 41.
This depends somewhat on the jurisdiction, however. In certain common-law jurisdictions (such as England), children may only be the beneficiaries of trusts. Regardless, this is often considered a form of “beneficial ownership” (see Penner 2014). Even in such jurisdictions where infants are allowed to own property, from a Hohfeldian point of view they only hold ownership-related claim-rights but not the ownership-related powers that require more advanced volitional capacity.
- 42.
For example, Article 16-1 of the French Civil Code states explicitly that the human body, its elements and its products cannot be the objects of economic rights (droit patrimonial). The question of whether human bodies can be property in the context of common-law jurisdictions is discussed extensively in (Davies and Naffine 2001).
- 43.
Even if in some jurisdictions the killing of one’s newborn may lead to a less harsh sentence than a typical homicide. For example, according to Finnish law, “[a] woman who in a state of exhaustion or distress caused by childbirth kills her baby shall be sentenced for infanticide” (Finnish criminal code, chapter 21, section 4).
- 44.
The Oregon Supreme Court has in fact recently delivered two interesting judgments in this regard. In State v. Fessenden/Dicke (355 Or 759 (2014)) the court affirmed a decision by a lower court, according to which “animals were included in the class of ‘persons’ that officers may aid without a warrant” (at 763). State v. Nix (355 Or 777 (2014)) concerned Oregon’s anti-merger statute, according to which a given type of conduct that violates only one statute constitutes as many crimes as there are victims. The court ruled that animals are such victims, which is why the defendant could be convicted of 20 counts of animal neglect rather than only one.
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Kurki, V.A.J. (2017). Why Things Can Hold Rights: Reconceptualizing the Legal Person. In: Kurki, V., Pietrzykowski, T. (eds) Legal Personhood: Animals, Artificial Intelligence and the Unborn. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-53462-6_5
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