For the last few months I have been working on a proposed framework for how courts can handle the question of "legal personhood" for digital minds. I think this is a very important issue, and I have noticed in discussions around the topic there are some very widely held misconceptions.
I have finished a rough draft of that work which can be found here, and have decided to post it on LW as a series of short posts. I'm trying to keep these very brief and easily readable. This first section is just an introduction to the concept of Legal Personhood.
Legal personhood is a term used to refer to the status of being considered a "person" under the law. This label includes "natural persons" like human adults, as well as “fictional persons” [1] like corporations.
It also includes subcategories within the aforementioned groups. For example, minors are “natural persons” who are treated differently under the law compared to adults. Trusts are “fictional” persons which are treated differently under the law compared to corporations.
It is best to think of “legal persons” as a broad category which encompasses a variety of different subcategories of “persons” within it. In that sense it can be visualized most easily as a venn diagram where one circle (legal persons) contains a number of smaller circles which overlap and diverge to various degrees.
Below is an oversimplified version purely for the purpose of helping the reader to visualize this. It does not contain all the relevant categories, nor is its particular arrangement in any way representative of any particular legal precedent or theory. It is merely an aid to assist the reader in conceptualizing.
What exactly is this light blue “space” of legal personhood inside which these categories occupy different, if overlapping, positions? Harvard law professor John Chipman Gray wrote in his seminal text The Nature and Sources of the Law;
"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."
When we look at the previous venn diagram then, we can imagine the light blue space of “legal personhood” as all possible rights which an entity might be entitled to, or duties they might be bound by.
When we see some overlap between subcategories, these are areas where different legal personalities enjoy the same rights and/or duties. For example both fictional persons like corporations and natural persons like human adults can sue and be sued. The areas where subcategories diverge from one another are bundles of rights or duties that one legal personality is endowed with which another is not. For example, an adult natural person has the right to vote and a child or a corporation cannot.
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"Fictional Persons" does not mean a fictional character, but rather a legal peron which exists only within the law and does not have an actual physical body or instantiation separate from the law. As Justice Marshall wrote in Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward, “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law". It is for this reason that we refer to corporations, and other entities which have legal personhood but no physical instantiation, as "fictional persons". They may also be referred to as "artificial persons".