Ela A. Leshem (Fordham University School of Law) has posted Normative Transplants: The Case of Ships as Legal Persons (Forthcoming in Legal Personhood in Private Law (Paul B. Miller, Christopher Essert & Eva Micheler eds., Cambridge University Press 2026)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
What does the legal personhood of ships contribute to theories of legal persons? Ships became legal persons in U.S. law through a process of “normative transplantation.” I coin this term to describe the migration of concepts between normative orders. In the case of ships, the conception that they are persons migrated from the normative order of aesthetics to that of law. When U.S. judges in the nineteenth century developed the doctrine of ships’ legal personality, they drew on longstanding personifications of ships in literature and culture. Influential judges in the twentieth century also traced the origin of ships’ legal personality to a migration from the normative order of religion.
This account of ships’ legal personality as a normative transplant is significant for theories of legal personhood in ways that apply both to past legal persons, like humans and corporations, and to potential future legal persons, like animals, parts of nature, and AI systems. First, the account reveals that artificial legal persons created for instrumental reasons, such as ships and corporations, can—like natural persons—have normative and ontological grounding outside of law. Second, the account shows that calling an entity’s legal personhood “fictional” amounts to a normative and not just a descriptive claim. Finally, the account encourages legal theorists to see that key concepts—such as personhood—migrate between law and a broad range of normative orders, including morality, aesthetics, and religion.