The seeds for this project were planted during my time as a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. One of the best things about life in that storied department was that it not only allowed for philosophical creativity and curiosity—it demanded them. One of my first serious intellectual curiosities was about the relationship between personhood and the law. How was it that things as diverse as human beings, slaves, corporations, animals, trees, ships, works of art, and national symbols like the stars and stripes could come to be legal persons or nonpersons? And how was this legal status different from philosophical conceptions of personhood?

After cutting my teeth on traditional philosophical problems in metaphysics concerning personhood and personal identity during my early years as a graduate student, I decided that John Locke's observation that person was a “forensic” term held part of the solution to the problem that I set for myself. I eventually came to believe that persons were first and foremost bearers of rights. Moreover, I believed that if being a bearer of rights was a matter of being recognized or treated as such—as the law teaches us—then being a person must in the final analysis also be a matter of being recognized or treated as such, or so I was prepared to spend my precious dissertation years arguing until Kurt Baier intervened. He convinced me that this task posed too great a summit to climb for the purposes of writing a dissertation.