James Toomey (University of Iowa – College of Law) has posted Legal Personal Identity (121 Northwestern University L. Rev. (forthcoming 2027)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
From contract to tort, private law presupposes a conception of “legal personal identity”—a theory of what makes individual legal persons themselves, and the same selves across time. Scholars have noted the relationship between private law and personal identity before—but have largely presumed that the law straightforwardly reidentifies natural legal persons by virtue of their bodies.
This Article challenges the reflexive identification of natural persons with their bodies in private law and offers a novel alternative—I argue that the law implicitly relies on something like the “narrative theory” of personal identity, described in the philosophical literature, which takes persons to be constituted by “self narratives.” Unlike a bodily theory, this account can explain the kinds of harms tort law seeks to remedy and how it does so, makes sense of the way in which the law tethers the duties of agents to the personal identities of their principals, and accounts for the normative structure of private law.
This perspective has several implications. For starters, it sheds light on the normative assumptions on which our system of private law rests and illustrates the stakes of alternatives. At the same time, while this account theorizes the legal identity of natural persons in private law, understanding its conception in narrative terms offers a path towards making sense of the law’s conception of the personal identity of corporations and in other areas of law.
Highly recommended.