Person, Property, Relationships: A Cont(r)actual View

Abstract

This article challenges the long-standing boundary that separates human beings from non-human entities, whether animate or inanimate. In doing so, it engages with the jurisprudential strands that debate the transformative power of law in moving towards a fuller recognition of human relations with non-human entities. To this end, the article first examines the legal theoretical strategies that scholars have so far developed to overcome the dichotomous vision that pits humans against non-humans. It then argues for a new model of understanding property, called cont(r)actualisation, which seeks to reconfigure existing strategies. It makes the case that the legal categories of person and object should be brought together under the overarching heading of ‘legal entity’. Rather than being built around humans as persons/subjects and non-human entities as objects/objects, law should be built around the contingent points of contact between particular entities in a particular web of relations. In this way, the article advances a view that does justice to how these entities contribute to what human beings are and do.