Legal personhood continues to serve an important role in the legal system. The millennial distinction of persons and things, while often unarticulated, is an essential building block of all legal relations. This introduction to persons and things outlines the past tradition, draws on present myths, and construes a utopia of which the articles in this special issue will comment, clarify, and criticize.

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.

The desire to prevent prenatal and preconceptual harm has led to a call for more legal protection for unborn and future children. This Article analyzes the way in which the Dutch legal system has responded to this call by identifying and critically scrutinizing two strategies employed in this response. First, to protect the unborn child from maternal harm, the concept of legal personality has been expanded to include the unborn child, albeit only the viable fetus. This strategy is criticized because its measures are presented as if they follow directly from the existing legal framework, whereas these measures are in fact based on several obscured assumptions and, therefore, bring to bear a new perspective on the concept of legal personality. The second strategy is applied to the future child. Instead of expanding an existing category, a new category is created to offer the future child a place within the law. The future child is addressed as the subject of legal relevant interests instead of rights. Although this strategy seems promising, it still faces difficulties when applied to the future child, which presumably has an interest in non-existence.

Along with numerous ethical and legal questions prompted by advancements in technology, there is a strong call for protection of “persons” in a broad sense. This Article discusses how such developments emerge in China. Chinese courts are often confronted with disputes concerning prenatal injuries, the disposition of frozen embryos, and infringements on the reputation of the deceased. After examining these cases, their underlying tensions, and the upcoming Chinese Civil Code, this Article reflects on the evolving concept of a natural person within the Chinese civil law context. The Article further asks how law deals with new problems while at the same time maintaining stability and coherence when viewed against a rapidly evolving biotechnological background.

The general assumption in the West is that there still is an inherent difference between persons and things. This divide informs how “the human” and human subjectivity are constructed as distinct from all others. Recently, the distinction has been challenged in posthumanist theory, where it has been argued that the divide between human and nonhuman agents—or rather, bodies—is always an effect of a differential set of powers. For this reason, the boundaries between human and nonhuman are always in flux. As posthumanist theorists have argued, this change in boundaries may be specifically visualized in relation to digital technology. Today, such technologies obfuscate the boundaries between persons and things, and the extensive utilization of smartphones, social media, and online search engines are just three common examples.

Drawing from Roberto Esposito's recent work on persons and things, this Article studies recent attempts to rethink international legal personality. Esposito's work resurrects the claim that personhood operates like a mask, splitting the legal and philosophical world into persons and things. International law differs from domestic law in that international legal personality has traditionally been the prerogative of states, not of (rational) individuals. Yet, this has not completely dismantled the persons/things logic, because the exclusive legal personality of states has continuously threatened to reduce individuals into things in the eyes of international law. It is perhaps for this reason that international legal theorists have long sought to extend international legal personality to individuals and other non-state actors. This Article addresses the most recent attempt, namely an attempt to shift international law towards a law of humanity. Without taking a stance on whether this project is a good idea or not, this Article raises some doubts about whether the concept of international legal personality can help in fulfilling the project's aim, namely to help increase human freedom and wellbeing. This is especially relevant because, regardless of whether legal personality is attributed primarily to the state or the individual, we still remain—according to Esposito—within a theoretical framework in which the dispositif of person necessarily excludes some forms of life in protecting or empowering others.

Investment treaty arbitration (ITA) has emerged as a space where the international legal personality of states and foreign investors is continuously created, maintained, and redefined. Focusing on treatment of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), this Article juxtaposes investment law's doctrinal foundations with Roberto Esposito's political philosophy to explore the dynamics, porosity, and ramifications of international legal personality in ITA. Skeptical of gradual conceptualizations of legal personality, this Article frames investment law in terms of Esposito's person/thing distinction and argues for SOEs to form a liminal category that exposes malleability of legal doctrines when ITA tribunals make or break international legal persons. Ultimately, the ITA cases seem to open a distinct dispositif of a SOE that both delineates the exact normative demarcation of the state as international legal person and creates pockets of indistinguishability and politics at its borders—often to the detriment of the Global South. This insight provides a new perspective on the creation of international legal persons in ITA and international law more generally but, at the same time, also adds a new dimension to Esposito's overarching framework resting on the asymmetric relationship between persons and things.

This Paper investigates legal subjectivity in the European Union. It takes seriously the principle according to which the individual is at the heart of the Union's activities and asks what kind of legal and political subjectivity the EU can render possible. The analysis draws on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and his conception of singular plurality. What comes to the fore is the interrelatedness of subjects and community. This implies that the subject should not be understood simply as an individual, nor as part of a communitarian whole. Neither view is ontologically plausible nor ethically sound. By conceptualizing subjectivity as both singular and plural, it may become possible to rethink the relationship between subjectivity and community in the Union. This is important because potential solutions to fundamental problems of legitimacy, solidarity, and the lack thereof, hinge on how the relationship is understood.

Legal metamorphoses between persons/things have been recurrent in history: Persons can become things, animals can turn into persons, and even ghosts can obtain personhood in the legal domain. Law would work then as a form of magic, a powerful instrument to create realities that, although fictional, have very real effects. Drawing on anthropology and legal scholarship, I will show the links between law and magic. In this endeavor, I examine two groups of legal cases from Argentina where people and animals respectively obtained personhood through the magic of law. First, I analyze the so-called human rights trials that are judging the crimes of the last military dictatorship (1976–1983), and I argue that these are working to restore the legal personhood of those who enforcedly disappeared. Second, I examine a series of judgments that have recently ruled—for the first time in modern legal history—that orangutans, chimps, and elephants are “nonhuman persons.” I conclude this Paper by contrasting legal magic with shamanic practices. I argue that even if these two are linked, it is possible to find in some forms of shamanism a different way of framing the relationship between persons/things that can offer an alternative (to) law.

This Article deploys cybernetic theory to argue that a novel legal impact imaginary has emerged. In this imaginary, the subjects of legal interventions are performed and enacted as cybernetic organisms, that is, as entities that process information and adapt to changes in their environment. This Article, then, argues that in this imaginary, law finds its effectiveness—not by threatening, cajoling, educating, and moralizing humans as before, but by affecting the composition of cybernetic organisms, giving rise to new kinds of legal subjects that transcend the former conceptual boundary between humans and non-humans, or persons and things. The cybernetic interventions work to change the cyborgs' behavioral responses, thus giving law a new kind modality of power. This Article develops a model for understanding cyborg regulation through case studies and argues that cyborg regulation deploys three distinct strategies. Cyborgs can be controlled through affecting the informational inputs the entities receive, through agencement practices that intervene in the material constitution of the cyborg cognitions, and, finally, by psycho-morphing humans to make them useful components of the cyborg cognitive machineries. The Article ends with a discussion of the theoretical implications of the transition to the cyborg imaginary.