The Legal Person and Its Other

A Comparative View on Drawing and Effacing Boundaries in Various Cultural Contexts

Abstract

“De-humanizing law” calls for a discussion of the concept of the legal person because legal processes of personification have at times gone beyond the anthropocentric bias in legal thinking and the definition of personhood has often brought about de-humanizing results. By scrutinizing various culturally and historically dependent drawings of the boundaries of personification, it shows that the presumed equivalence between legal persons and humans does not hold. This is illustrated through an analysis of legal personification of animals and some recent legal attempts to attribute personality to nature. In contrast, there have always been efforts to deny certain human beings the status of legal persons. Despite becoming more inclusive historically, modern law does not eschew with creating abnormal non-persons to underline the construction of individual/rational attribution and accountability. Defining legal personhood not only implies a differentiation between persons and non-persons, but, especially in the Western world, between persons and things. Whereas bio-political issues have somewhat challenged this division, there are examples showing that in some contexts this division was never made clearly in the first place. Finally, cultural heritage reveals the occidental bias concerning the conception of personhood, namely its link to an individualized image of the ingenious author.