Legal personality and the natural world: on the persistence of the human measure of value

Abstract

Addressing the fundamental anthropocentrism of law, the author argues that two influential families of thinkers have played a critical role in sustaining it: secular rationalists and conservative Christians. The influence of these thinkers has combined to engineer and sustain a set of public concerns about the fitting borders of legal personality that are essentially humanistic in the sense that they focus almost exclusively on the human species and the perceived limits of its interests. The author's reluctant conclusion is that, notwithstanding the eloquence, intelligence and power of Stone's arguments, he was unable to attract the attention of a critical mass of the influential, let alone persuade them to set aside their own human concerns. Law continues to exclude the non-human from its community of persons.

Vulnerable bodies, vulnerable systems

“…91-92); such an approach has also permitted hierarchical and discriminatory treatment, and indeed social exclusion on the basis of bodily characteristics that deviate from this norm (Fineman, 2014, p. 21). The challenge for feminist legal theory has been to expose this absence, without provoking ingrained beliefs about the binary differences between male and female, or males and others (Smart, 1989, p. 113;consider also Bottomley, 2002, p. 114;Naffine, 2004), so as to recognise the experiences of men and women, and men and other categories we might draw upon, as different, and to highlight this difference as being important to legal thinking.…”

“…Thus, when we reference the body, we mean both the semantic construct of 'body' that all function systems possess as part of their idea of what a person is (for example, law's legal person; see Naffine, 2003Naffine, , 2011Naffine, , 2012Naffine and Owens, 1997, p. 7;and in autopoiesis Teubner, 1993, p. 26; or also protections of the legal body, for example habeas corpus, or the treatment of bodies in medicine), and the body as physical embodiment, corporeality. We use the concept of the body to incorporate a notion of the factually undeniable physical embodiment of humans (see Bottomley, 2002, p. 128;Fineman, 2008Fineman, -2009; and in autopoiesis Halsall, 2012;Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2007), and their consequent vulnerability, as a means of bringing the concept of materiality to autopoiesis.…”

Human rights violations as humanist performance: Dehumanizing criminalized refugee youth in Canada

“…Chan and Chunn (, xv) argue, “Laws and policies reflect the subjectivity of the powerful—the White, affluent, adult male. It is his behaviour that forms the basis of proscriptions and remedies and it is he who those in power imagine when they construct the law.” Law establishes certain beings as legal persons and right holders; conversely, by denying legal rights and duties, law “un‐persons” (Naffine ). In other words, law can dehumanize.…”

Privacy, Personhood, and Property in the Age of Genomics

“…identification and interpretation of individuals and cohorts poses challenges for how societies and legal systems construe personhood, the foundation for the rights enjoyed by human animals under national and international law [6][7][8][9][10]. It provokes questions about tensions between personal and social goods, tensions evident in all privacy and intellectual property law.…”