ABSTRACT
This Article defends a functionalist theory of legal persons that substantively unifies individuals, corporations, and other constructed or juridical persons, and then canvasses revisionary implications for law. In more words, I argue that, because the law has (and ought to have) an instrumentalist conception of the world, legal persons are defined and delineated on the basis of functional – rather than natural or material – structures and properties. I then argue that, in order to fully reflect and realize this functionalism, the law’s present understanding of legal persons must be expanded in a number of significant ways. These include that i) the boundaries of individual legal persons – along with personal rights – ought to depart from the boundaries of human bodies far more explicitly and expansively than they presently do; ii) that the law ought to seriously consider contextual or collective legal persons beyond corporations; and iii) that the law’s mental state requirements perhaps ought to be interpreted as satisfiable by purely functional mental states, including those of ‘extended’ and artificial minds.
Chatterjee, Mala, A Functionalist Theory of Legal Persons (March 28, 2024).
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