In law, a 'person' is not always a human being
In short: A corporation can own property, and a river can hold rights, but an elephant might still be classified as mere furniture. Legal personhood isn't about biology; it is a formal classification that determines who or what can bear rights, owe duties, and navigate the justice system.
The legal distinction between a 'person' and a 'thing' dates back to Roman law. In this framework, 'things' are property—objects that cannot hold rights. A 'legal person,' however, is any entity capable of engaging in the legal system: owning property, entering contracts, and being sued or suing others. This means that while humans are naturally legal persons, the law also creates 'fictional persons' like corporations, monasteries, and even collective enterprises.
Historically, this classification has been used to both empower and exclude. For example, the doctrine of 'persona ficta' in canon law allowed monasteries to own infrastructure independently of monks who took vows of poverty. Conversely, many groups were systematically denied personhood; for instance, the 1857 Dred Scott decision and the 1927 Buck v. Bell case in the U.S. denied personhood to enslaved people and people with disabilities, respectively. In the late 19th century, the common-law concept of coverture even stripped married women of their independent legal status.
Today, the boundaries are expanding toward nature and technology. New Zealand and Ecuador have granted legal personhood to rivers and nature to facilitate conservation. However, a significant disconnect remains for sentient animals. In 2022, a New York court acknowledged an elephant named Happy as a moral being but ruled it remained 'property,' leaving the court powerless to grant her rights. As we develop neural networks capable of playing games or AI chatbots like LaMDA, the question shifts from biology to sentience: if a non-human entity can sense and respond to its world, should the law eventually recognize it as a person?
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: What is a person?
- Also: Legal personhood | Definition, Law, Corporations, & Artificial Intelligence | Britannica
- Also: Legal person
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