Daniel Goldsworthy (Deakin Law School) has posted Of Mice, Men and Machines: A Future Direction for Legal Personhood, 99 Australian L.J. 920 (2025), on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Law personifies its subjects. Once a legal person, certain rights, duties and obligations follow. At least that is the standard picture; but that picture is somewhat incomplete. The orthodox view of legal personhood is that it requires no necessary connection with human personhood; the legal person is simply whomever, or whatever, law says it is. And recently, the law has had quite a lot to say on expanding these conceptual boundaries. Examples include conferring legal personhood on a range of natural phenomena (such as rivers, mountains, and mother nature), movements to extend legal personhood to animals, as well as related but adjacent conversations about the appropriate legal recognition for AI. Such instances require careful consideration of the nature and scope of legal personhood in order that we may pursue its coherent and principled development. This article makes a modest case for how we might do so.
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