About the Symposium
The core question addressed by this Symposium is both timely and timeless: Who or what should receive recognition as a person in our legal system? Legal personhood is currently at a crossroads. Around the world, lawmakers and courts are debating whether to expand legal personhood to animals, nature, and AI. Meanwhile, the legal personhood of other entities—such as fetuses, corporations, states, and tribes—continues to be a topic of deep disagreement.
Legal personhood implicates questions that are foundational and consequential. It puts at issue who should have recognized status and standing in our legal system. Who matters morally? What legal rights are they entitled to? What legal duties do they owe? These questions in turn raise a host of difficult philosophical and scientific questions. What ontological, biological, and metaphysical features ground moral and legal status?
The Symposium hopes to engage these questions in their complexity. It will consist of six invited essays, with panel discussions structured around each of those essays. The essay we are inviting you to contribute is on the topic of Legal Personhood and Disability or Legal Personhood and the Family. The California Law Review has asked that the essay be no more than 6,500 words. But while the allocated length is short, we hope that the format will still allow for a substantial original contribution on either of those two topics, where the specific focus on disability or the family serves as the context in which the broader conceptual and normative questions of legal personhood are considered.
The Organizing Committee
Hanoch Dagan
Elizabeth J. Boalt Distinguished Professor of Law and Founding Director, Berkeley Center for Private Law Theory
Berkeley Law
Ela Leshem
Associate Professor of Law
Fordham
Agenda
TBA