Legal personhood is a foundational concept of Western legal thought. It has recently become highly topical, underpinning contemporary debates over the legal status of animals, corporations, foetuses, natural objects, and artificial intelligences. The notion is furthermore crucial in explaining the historical legal statuses of women and slaves. Rather than addressing who or what should be a legal person, this book examines the concept itself. The book consists of an Introduction and three parts. The Introduction presents the Western doctrine of legal personhood, the relevant terms and concepts, and the methodology employed in the book. Part I shows, first, how legal personhood came to be understood synonymously with the holding of legal rights and/or duties. It then subjects this understanding of legal personhood to a rigorous scrutiny, exposing numerous problems afflicting the view. Part II provides a completely new, general theory of legal personhood, arguing that legal personhood is best understood as a cluster property, consisting of distinct incidents. The final part applies the new theory to explain and structure the numerous debates surrounding legal personhood, explaining what is at stake in the animal legal personhood trials taking place in the US and elsewhere.

A relatively recent form of animal activism is lawsuits intended to declare some animals as legal persons. A pioneer of this approach is the U.S.-based Nonhuman Rights Project (NhRP). This organization's primary strategy has been to invoke the writ of habeas corpus, which protects the right to personal freedom of "persons." The article criticizes the notion of legal personhood that the NhRP is employing and explains how an alternative understanding of legal personhood could perhaps make nonhuman rights more palatable for courts.

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The chapter presents a new theory of legal personhood. It argues that legal personhood is a cluster property, and best understood in terms of disseverable but interconnected incidents. It sets out by distinguishing passive and active incidents, and then enumerates and presents both types of incidents. While doing so, the chapter highlights the benefits of an incident-based approach to legal personhood. After presenting the incidents, the notion of a ‘subject of law’ is offered as an alternative way of analysing legal personhood. The chapter concludes by addressing some of the connections between personhood and legal personhood.