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
TBA
Abstracts
Seth Davis – Public Wrongs
Ela Leshem and Hanoch Dagan – Law’s Two Persons
Paul Miller – Corporate Personality, Purpose, and Liability
Manish Oza – Quasi-Corporations
Participants
Julian Arato (Michigan)
Mala Chatterjee (Columbia)
Hanoch Dagan (Berkeley)
Seth Davis (Berkeley)
Ela Leshem (Fordham)
Paul Miller (Notre Dame)
Amy Sepinwall (Wharton)
Manish Oza (Western)
Gregg Strauss (UVA)