Who are Law's Persons? From Cheshire Cats to Responsible Subjects
| Date | 01 May 2003 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.6603002 |
| Published date | 01 May 2003 |
| Author | Ngaire Naffine |
Who are Law’s Persons? From Cheshire Cats to
Responsible Subjects
Ngaire Naffine
n
What is it to be a legal person? A review of the jurisprudence of persons reveals
considerable confusion about this central legal question, as well as deep intellectual
divisions. To certain jurists, law’s person should and does approximate a
metaphysical person. Depending on the metaphysics of the jurist, the legal person
is thus variously defined by his uniquely human nature, by his possession of a soul,
or by his capacity for reason, and therefore his moral and legal responsibility. To
other jurists, law’s person is not a metaphysical person but rather a pure legal
abstraction; he is no more than a formal, abstract, but nonetheless highly
convenient device of law. This paper endeavours to bring some order and clarity to
these scholarly debates about the nature of legal personality. It also considers their
implications for feminist legal theorists, with their enduring interest in the
character of law’s subject.
‘If terms in common legal use are used exactly, it is well to know it; if they are used inexactly,
it is well to know that, and to remark just how they are used.’
James Bradley Thayer’s Preliminary Treatise on Evidence’ (1898)
1
This paper is about how, why, and with what and whom, law peoples its world.
More precisely, it is about who and what counts as a ‘person’ in law and who does
not: who can act and why some can do more than others.
The law of ‘persons’ comprises an often-puzzling jurisprudence, marked by its
uncertainty and its inconsistency. John Dewey made this observation in 1926,
asserting that ‘There is no general agreement regarding the nature in se of the jural
subject; courts and legislators do their work without such agreement, sometimes
without any conception or theory at all regarding its nature’.
2
In 2001 the Harvard
Law Review confirmed this diagnosis: sometimes the term ‘person’ was used to
mean a human being (variously defined); other times it was treated as a formal
legal device (also variously defined). The Harvard note concluded that ‘the law of
the person is fraught with deep ambiguity and significant tension’; that the
definitional problem of the person was likely to become more acute with
‘technological and economic progress’; and further that the subject was so ‘grossly
undertheorised’ that it merited more attention.
3
n
Professor of Law, University of Adelaide. For their generous comments and advice on various
written and oral versions of this paper, I thank Letitia Anderson, Margaret Davies, Paul Fairall,
John Gava, Laura Grenfell, Ian Leader-Elliott, Horst Lucke, Natalie Stoljar, Adrienne Stone,
Greg Taylor as well as members of Flinders Law School and the Law School of the University of
Tasmania. I am also grateful to an anonymous referee for many helpful suggestions.
1 Quoted in W.N. Hohfeld, ‘Some Fundamental Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning’
in W.W. Cook (ed), Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning and other
Legal Essays by W.N. Hohfeld (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923) 23, 35.
2 John Dewey, The Historic Background of Corporate Legal Personality (1926) 35 Yale Law
Journal 655, 660.
3 ‘Notes: What We Talk About When We Talk About Persons: The Language of a Legal Fiction’
(2001) 114 Harvard Law Review 1746, 1768.
rThe Modern Law Review Limited 2003. (MLR 66:3, May). Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
346
The present task is to explain some of the ambiguities and tensions in the
jurisprudence of persons, and to identify and expound the different uses of the
term. The paper also endeavours to discover whether law’s persons necessarily
derive their meaning from metaphysical conceptions of the person.
Though the work of this paper is essentially conceptual analysis, it is of
considerable practical and political importance. Perhaps the greatest political act
of law is the making of a legal person (simply put, he who can act in law) and, in
the same move, the making of legal non-persons (those who cannot act in law and
who are generally thought of as property). Until the American civil war, in many
respects slaves were not ‘persons’ but were rather a form of property.
4
Well into
the twentieth century, women could not run for certain public offices open only to
‘persons’ because the courts declared that they did not count as persons for this
statutory purpose.
5
And in most ways, animals continue to be excluded, as a
matter of course, from the category of person. There is no question of them being
protected by the offences against ‘the person’. It is impossible to murder the family
pet because it is not, in this respect, a person. It is possible however to cause
damage to someone’s property by the same act.
This is not to suggest a neat cleavage of the legal world into two mutually
exclusive categories: being and thing. Corporations are created as both persons
and property and so have a dual status. Thus they can both trade as persons and
be traded as property. By contrast humans, it is generally said, can only ever be
persons. And yet, as we will discover, there are heated debates among jurists about
whether all humans truly satisfy all the necessary conditions of legal personality.
6
Defining legal persons
The law of persons is not a discrete field of study in the common law world, but is
scattered throughout the different branches of law. It is to be found in an extensive
legal literature embracing case and statute law and learned commentary. We have
therefore to discover the nature of law’s persons by surveying many parts of law,
and then often deriving its meaning only by inference.
7
However there are pockets
of case law in which ‘the person’ forms the subject of sustained discussion because
the entity in question appears to have a problematic status.
4 American law was inconsistent in its constitution of the personality of slaves. While they were
denied many of the rights of ‘persons’ or ‘citizens’ they were still held responsible for their
crimes which meant that they were persons to the extent that they were criminally accountable.
The variable status of American slaves is discussed in ‘Notes: What We Talk About When We
Talk About Persons’, ibid 1746.
5 But of course women were persons in many other respects. Most obviously, they were protected
by the offences against the person, with the notable exception of the spousal immunity for rape,
which meant that married women could not invoke the law of rape against their husbands. The
final persons’ case was Edwards vAttorney General, Canada (1929). A legal history of the
persons’ cases is to be found in A. Sachs and J.H. Wilson, Sexism and the Law: A Study of Male
Beliefs and Legal Bias in Britain and the United States (Oxford: M. Robertson, 1978). In
Edwards the Privy Council finally conceded that women were ‘persons’ for the purpose of the
right to be nominated to the Canadian Senate.
6 There are also debates about what it is to be a legal human. Human beings, to qualify as
persons, must satisfy certain legal requirements of humanity. For one thing, they must be born
and not yet dead and both birth and death are legally defined.
7 According to Richard Tur, ‘There is no general law of persons, but rather, a series of rules
concerning relationships and liabilities’. See R. Tur, ‘The ‘‘Person’’ in Law’ in A. Peacocke and
G. Gillett (eds), Persons and Personality: A Contemporary Inquiry (Oxford: Basil Blackwell,
1987) 123.
Who are Law’s Persons?May 2003]
347rThe Modern Law Review Limited 2003
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