Claudio Novelli (Yale University – Digital Ethics Center) has posted Extending Legal Personhood to Nature: The Lake Garda Proposal in Cognitive Perspective on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This article examines the Italian legislative proposal to grant legal subjectivity to Lake Garda (DDL 1759, 2026) as a case study in how legal personhood extends to new entities. The article draws on the ‘radial conception’ of legal personhood, according to which legal personhood has no fixed, mind-independent definition. Instead, the concept is structured around a central case, in many legal systems, the adult citizen of sound mind. This central case results from the convergence of the legally salient cognitive models and produces prototype effects that shape how extension to new cases proceeds. Extensions from the central case are not achieved, though, by logical deduction but through imaginative and analogical reasoning. What matters is whether the extension is persuasive to the legal community that must accept it. Testing the bill against the radial conception, the article finds it well-constructed: e.g., it deploys the right image schemas to make the lake cognitively available as a unified legal subject and grounds the extension in a comparative chain of precedents that reduces its apparent novelty. Where the bill falls short, however, is in leaving unresolved the doctrinal interactions with Italian private and administrative law that a skeptical legal audience will notice first.
Highly recommended!
Novelli’s cognitive-linguistics-meets-law methodology—drawing on Lakoff’s radial categories and Steven Winter’s A Clearing in the Forest—is worth comparing to the functionalist approach to legal personhood that I have defended elsewhere (link). Both reject essentialism about personhood. But where the functionalist approach asks which roles a candidate entity can perform within a legal system, Novelli asks which cognitive structures and image schemas make an extension persuasive to the legal community that must accept it.
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