A detour in the debate? (If you can’t define ‘person’ perhaps you can define ‘nonperson.)

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5263669

Legislating Nonpersonhood

Recently, two state legislatures – Idaho’s and Utah’s – passed statutes that preclude courts, agencies, and lawmakers from recognizing the legal personhood of nonhuman animals, nature, artificial intelligence, and inanimate objects. These “nonpersonhood statutes” are responses to social, political, and legal efforts to expand the concept of personhood to recognize the rights of nature, animals, and sentient artificial consciousnesses, as well as the duties of artificially intelligent machines. As social movements continue to advocate for more robust moral and legal status for various nonhuman entities, this kind of legislative backlash is virtually inevitable. Idaho and Utah’s nonpersonhood statutes are thus harbingers of legislative debates to come.

This Article evaluates the nonpersonhood statutes against the backdrop of jurisprudential theories of legal personhood. It describes the social context in which these laws have arisen and critically interrogates the rationales and discursive practices of the laws’ sponsors and proponents. It argues that the nonpersonhood statutes conflict with leading jurisprudential theories of personhood, illustrating the malleability and indeterminacy of the “legal person.” The nonpersonhood statutes show how personhood is a vehicle for social, political, and axiological beliefs about who should – and should not – matter before the law. The nonpersonhood statutes demonstrate the ways in which the concept of the human person is defined in contradistinction to its Others: the animal, the natural, the artificial, and the material. This kind of abjection justifies the relegation of nonhuman others to the status of nonpersons, which in turn justifies and enables acts of violence, especially against animals and nature.

This Article’s analysis of the nonpersonhood statutes makes several novel contributions to the literature on personhood, ecology, animal rights, and artificial intelligence. First, it collects and describes the legislative histories of these first-of-their-kind laws. Second, it analyzes the discourse of personhood in the context of legislators, who are an underexplored source for theorizing personhood compared to existing scholarship, which has focused on the opinions of judges and the theories of scholars. Third, it explores the gap between jurisprudential theories and legislative practice, illustrating the indeterminate and political nature of complex legal concepts such as “personhood.” Ultimately, it critiques these laws as impediments to the much-needed process of rethinking the human person and its relations to the rest of existence.

Could be useful…

https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/journal-of-property-law/vol11/iss4/1/

Foreword: The ‘Why’ & How’ of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Scholarship

In the course of publishing the 2024–25 Volume of the Texas A&M Journal of Property Law, we, the Editorial Board, were presented with the opportunity to publish a collection of articles drafted explicitly with the assistance of Artificial Intelligence (“AI”). After some consideration, we made the decision to do so. The following is our endeavor to share with our peers and colleagues—who may soon find themselves in similar situations—what we have learned in this process and, separately, contribute some forward-looking standards that can be implemented in the arena of legal scholarship for the transparent signaling and taxonomizing of AI-assisted works.