Why cannot anything be a legal person?

Abstract

This article addresses Chapter 4 of Visa A. J. Kurki’s latest book A Theory of Legal Personhood, in which the author discusses constraints on the concept of legal personhood and concludes that not anything can be a legal person. Kurki suggests that those who claim otherwise often conflate two separate notionsof “legal person”. The first part of this article reframes the problem by locating it within an essentialist framework. Parts two and three reinterpret Kurki’s theory in relation to this framework and apply Khalidi’s theory of social kinds to Kurki’s understanding of legal personhood. Finally, part four shows that the consequence of Kurki’s theory is that not only his legal persons but also his legal platforms are eventually grounded in non-social features. Since this consequence is suspicious for a legal positivist, this article concludes by suggesting an alternative approach, in which constraints on legal personhood are of a pragmatic rather than a conceptual or metaphysical nature.