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Animals, Slaves, and Corporations: Analyzing Legal Thinghood

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Visa Kurki

Abstract

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The Article analyzes the notion of legal “thinghood” in the context of the person–thing bifurcation. In legal scholarship, there are numerous assumptions pertaining to this definition that are often not spelled out. In addition, one's chosen definition of “thing” is often simply taken to be the correct one. The Article scrutinizes these assumptions and definitions. First, a brief history of the bifurcation is offered. Second, three possible definitions of “legal thing” are examined: Things as nonpersons, things as rights and duties, and things as property. The first two definitions are rejected as not being very interesting or serving any heuristic function. Conversely, understanding legal things as property is meaningful, useful, and helps to understand what it means to say that animals are legally things. Defining things as property has certain rather important implications, which are analyzed at the end of the Article. For instance, not everything needs to be either a person or a thing: The historical institution of outlawry involved treating individuals neither as legal persons nor as legal things. One must conclude that the person–thing bifurcation is less fundamental than is often assumed.

Type
Special Issue Traditions, Myths, and Utopias of Personhood
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 18 , Issue 5: Special Issue Traditions, Myths, and Utopias of Personhood , 01 September 2017 , pp. 1069 - 1090
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by German Law Journal, Inc. 

References

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3 Steven Wise endorses this understanding of slavery as well. See id. Older examples include, for instance, the Oxford jurisprudence professor Thomas Holland, who wrote that slaves are things, being “Objects of Rights and Duties.” See Holland, Thomas Erskine, The Elements of Jurisprudence 68 (1880).Google Scholar

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51 See id. at X. See also Pietrzykowski, Tomasz & Stancioli, Brunello, Introduction: Modern Challenges to the Concept of a Person in Law, in New Approaches to the Personhood in Law 7 (Tomasz Pietrzykowski & Brunello Stancioli eds., 2016) (“In other words, one may be either a subject of a party of legal relations (a person) or merely their object (a thing).”).Google Scholar

52 Hegel was rather famous for insisting that all rights pertain to things. See Hegel, supra note 29, at 71. See also Stucki, supra note 1, at 176.Google Scholar

53 See generally A Debate over Rights. Philosophical Enquiries (Matthew H Kramer, NE Simmonds & Hillel Steiner, 1998). I am here talking of rights and duties as Hohfeldian legal positions, for example, as outcomes of legal interpretation. There are of course some alternative accounts of rights. According to Joseph Raz, rights are reasons to set someone under a legal duty. Regardless, they pertain to duties and hence to actions and forbearances. Raz, supra note 42.Google Scholar

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58 Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld presented his scheme in Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld, Some Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Legal Reasoning, 23 Yale L. J. 16 (1913).Google Scholar

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61 I would like to thank Toni Selkälä for this example. Slavery as a legal institution has disappeared, but de facto slavery likely still exists. See Bales, Kevin, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (2012).Google Scholar

62 Strings of numbers can of course constitute immaterial property.Google Scholar

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