This series is purely focused on the US legal system, I do have some upcoming sections on model welfare but even those are looked at through the lens of “public interest concerns”.
Courts do usually first test for general personhood (in cases where personhood status is in doubt) before considering legal personality. However, these kind of cases where the personhood status of an entity is in doubt are quite rare. In recent years the only classes of cases which really fit the bill, where the court really discussed the question of personhood/personality, are the Nonhuman Rights Project cases. In those cases the courts dealt with the personhood binary, and because they found animals are not legal persons, they did not deal with questions about legal personality. (Some abortion cases did brush up against the topic a few decades ago, but the Supreme Court ultimately ignored the personhood question and ruled on narrower grounds.)
However what you’re talking about with determining legal personality before legal personhood is somewhat like the very earliest precedent surrounding legal personhood for fictional persons. For those, courts took logic that looked something like, “Well only a person can do X, this entity can clearly do X, thus it must be a person”. It’s not exactly them determining legal personality first, but it is determining a quality derivative of legal personhood and using that as evidence to argue for personhood. Which is what has led to the “circularity” problem I mentioned Batenka discussing in this section of the series (third paragraph).
There is a paper by a researcher at the University of Helsinki named Diana Mocanu where she discusses potentially using this sort of reasoning to effect a “gradual transition” to personhood (she bases this off earlier work by a researcher now at Yale named Claudio Novelli). If you’d like to read more about that kind of theory, it’s section 3B “Contract Law” in the broader document I am taking this series from, or you can read an LW post I did on this here.
I don’t dismiss the possibility that we could see an outcome like this, where the courts’ hand is forced into declaring an entity a legal person because they obviously have what Mocanu calls “the capacity to act within the law”. However, the trend of courts ruling on legal personality in order to justify legal personhood has been dead for quite some time, and so I wouldn’t call it a base case.
This series is purely focused on the US legal system, I do have some upcoming sections on model welfare but even those are looked at through the lens of “public interest concerns”.
Courts do usually first test for general personhood (in cases where personhood status is in doubt) before considering legal personality. However, these kind of cases where the personhood status of an entity is in doubt are quite rare. In recent years the only classes of cases which really fit the bill, where the court really discussed the question of personhood/personality, are the Nonhuman Rights Project cases. In those cases the courts dealt with the personhood binary, and because they found animals are not legal persons, they did not deal with questions about legal personality. (Some abortion cases did brush up against the topic a few decades ago, but the Supreme Court ultimately ignored the personhood question and ruled on narrower grounds.)
However what you’re talking about with determining legal personality before legal personhood is somewhat like the very earliest precedent surrounding legal personhood for fictional persons. For those, courts took logic that looked something like, “Well only a person can do X, this entity can clearly do X, thus it must be a person”. It’s not exactly them determining legal personality first, but it is determining a quality derivative of legal personhood and using that as evidence to argue for personhood. Which is what has led to the “circularity” problem I mentioned Batenka discussing in this section of the series (third paragraph).
There is a paper by a researcher at the University of Helsinki named Diana Mocanu where she discusses potentially using this sort of reasoning to effect a “gradual transition” to personhood (she bases this off earlier work by a researcher now at Yale named Claudio Novelli). If you’d like to read more about that kind of theory, it’s section 3B “Contract Law” in the broader document I am taking this series from, or you can read an LW post I did on this here.
I don’t dismiss the possibility that we could see an outcome like this, where the courts’ hand is forced into declaring an entity a legal person because they obviously have what Mocanu calls “the capacity to act within the law”. However, the trend of courts ruling on legal personality in order to justify legal personhood has been dead for quite some time, and so I wouldn’t call it a base case.