Future Concepts of Law
The Future of Social Agency and Legal Personhood
Gunther Teubner | Mireille Hildebrandt
Elena Esposito | Horatia Muir Watt

It is among the major moral achievements of mankind that all human beings equally enjoy legal capacity. This generic inclusion into the legal system gives effect to the autonomous will, understood as the capacity of human beings to determine themselves and to act morally out of freedom accordingly. From a moral point of view, it is then already highly questionable to extend legal personhood – which appears inextricably linked to human individuals – to corporations and create artificial persons. And yet this has been a legal reality since the 19th century.

However, the foundational concept of legal personhood has again become highly topical, underpinning contemporary debates over the legal status even of animals, natural objects, ecosystems and artificial intelligences. Would the legal system be committing a moral transgression if it were to grant rights to such non-human entities – even after they have been accepted in society as moral, political or economic agents? Is it really the case, as is claimed in this debate, that we would lose the hold of a basic normative orientation that deliberately places the human being at the center of the legal order, not least in view of the political aberrations of the 20th century? Or, on the contrary, is it necessary to expand the concept of legal personhood in order to protect humanity from the excesses of unpredictable algorithms and to protect nature from the self-destructive excesses of humanity?

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