September 18th, 2026
About the Colloquium
Legal personhood is emerging as a field of renewed interest. This interest is often driven by contemporary debates over whether legal personhood should be extended to animals, nature, and AI. Scholars debate the normative grounds of legal personhood, its ontological conditions, and the nature of legal fictions. The focus on new types of legal persons runs some risk of neglecting old types. Group persons—such as corporations, states, municipalities, tribes, and religious or other communities—have long raised questions that continue to be pressing. We think the conceptual and normative underpinnings of legal personhood deserve renewed attention in the context of group persons, which may also help shed light on broader legal personhood debates.
This colloquium will bring together scholars who study legal personhood generally with scholars who focus on particular types of group persons, such as corporations, states, and tribes. One of our main questions will be how the development of personhood law as a field can, amid debates over new legal persons, be enriched by the longstanding practice and evolving theories of group persons.
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
8:30 am: Breakfast
8:50 am: Welcome
9:00 am: Hanoch Dagan & Ela Leshem, Law’s Two Persons
Commentator: Jay Wallace
10:10 am: Gregg Strauss, Corporations Cannot be Equal Legal Persons
Commentator: David Grewal
11:20 am: Seth Davis, Should the Public Have Standing
Commentator: Mark Gergen
12:30 pm: Lunch
1:30 pm: Paul Miller, Corporate Personality, Purpose, and Liability
Commentator: Daniel Viehoff
2:40 pm: Manish Oza, Quasi-Corporations
Commentator: José Argueta Funes
3:50 pm: Amy Sepinwall, Corporations and Compelled Speech
Commentator: Sarah Song
4:50 pm: Closing Remarks
5:30 pm: Dinner
Participants
Andrew Charles Baker (Berkeley)
Elena Chachko (Berkeley)
Hanoch Dagan (Berkeley)
Seth Davis (Berkeley)
José Argueta Funes (Berkeley)
Jason Ferguson (Berkeley)
Stavros Gadinis (Berkeley)
Mark Gergen (Berkeley)
David Grewal (Berkeley)
Ela Leshem (Fordham)
Paul Miller (Notre Dame)
Manish Oza (Western)
Amy Sepinwall (Penn)
Sarah Song (Berkeley)
Anna Stilz (Berkeley)
Gregg Strauss (Virginia)
Daniel Viehoff (Berkeley)
Jay Wallace (Berkeley)