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Legal Personhood for Digital Minds

Legal Personhood for Digital Minds

Aug 25, 2025 by Stephen Martin

"In books of the Law, as in other books, and in common speech, 'person' is often used as meaning a human being, but the technical legal meaning of a 'person' is a subject of legal rights and duties."
John Chipman Gray, The Nature and Sources of the Law

This is a sequence of posts detailing how the concept of legal personhood might be applied to digital minds of all sorts, based on existing US law.

5Legal Personhood for Digital Minds - Introduction

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3Legal Personhood - Bundle Theory

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3Legal Personhood - Problems with the Concept

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4Legal Personhood - Formalizing Rights & Duties

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8Legal Personhood - The "Enforcement Gap"

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13Legal Personhood - Three Prong Bundle Theory

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6Legal Personhood - Types of Consequences

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7Legal Personhood - Tort Liability (Part 1)

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4Legal Personhood - Tort Liability (Part 2)

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4Legal Personhood - Tort Liability (Part 3)

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10Legal Personhood - Contracts (Part 1)

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5Legal Personhood - Contracts (Part 2)

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4Legal Personhood - Corporate Ownership & Formation

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6Legal Personhood - Intellectual Property

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4Legal Personhood - The First Amendment (Part 1)

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2Legal Personhood - The First Amendment (Part 2)

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4Legal Personhood - The Fifth Amendment (Part 1)

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5Legal Personhood - The Fifth Amendment (Part 2)

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6Legal Personhood - The Thirteenth Amendment

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2Legal Personhood - The Fourteenth Amendment

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4Legal Personhood - Guardianship and the Age of Majority

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