ABSTRACT
Recently, two state legislatures – Idaho’s and Utah’s – passed statutes that preclude courts, agencies, and lawmakers from recognizing the legal personhood of nonhuman animals, nature, artificial intelligence, and inanimate objects. These ‘nonpersonhood statutes’ are responses to social, political, and legal efforts to expand the concept of personhood to recognize the rights of nature, animals, and sentient artificial consciousnesses, as well as the duties of artificially intelligent machines. As social movements continue to advocate for more robust moral and legal status for various nonhuman entities, this kind of legislative backlash is virtually inevitable. Idaho and Utah’s nonpersonhood statutes are thus harbingers of legislative debates to come.
This Article evaluates the nonpersonhood statutes against the backdrop of jurisprudential theories of legal personhood. It describes the social context in which these laws have arisen and critically interrogates the rationales and discursive practices of the laws’ sponsors and proponents. It argues that the nonpersonhood statutes conflict with leading jurisprudential theories of personhood, illustrating the malleability and indeterminacy of the ‘legal person’. The nonpersonhood statutes show how personhood is a vehicle for social, political, and axiological beliefs about who should-and should not-matter before the law. The nonpersonhood statutes demonstrate the ways in which the concept of the human person is defined in contradistinction to its Others: the animal, the natural, the artificial, and the material. This kind of abjection justifies the relegation of nonhuman others to the status of nonpersons, which in turn justifies and enables acts of violence, especially against animals and nature.
Liebman, Matthew, Legislating Nonpersonhood (May 21, 2025), University of San Francisco Law Research Paper (forthcoming).
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