Article: The Fragmentation of Legal Personhood

The legal concept of personhood, like that of property, has become increasingly susceptible to nominalistic and positivistic renderings, according to which it merely denotes the contingent arrangement of incidents as ascribed by lawmakers to various objects (“right and duty bearing units.”). The results have been fragmentation in our concept of personhood and displacement of a classical understanding tethered to natural personhood and ontological and moral facts about human nature and the human condition. In this chapter, I critique theories that champion or assume the inevitability of fragmentation. I also argue for restoration of the classical conception, redeveloped in the form of an integrative theory of legal personhood. I argue that, apart from its normative appeal, the integrative theory better explains our law including, specifically, the pervasive practice of relying on a focal type of legal person in modulating the extension of legal personhood to non-focal types. I also address the significance of the integrative theory for novel and hard cases, including proposals for the extension of legal personhood to LLMs and other forms of artificial intelligence.