The enTalkenator Podcast

Workshop on Toomey’s “Personhood as Participation”


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James Toomey, Personhood as Participation.

Solum’s Download of the Week for July 12, 2025. Available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5334704.

This is a synthetic academic workshop generated using enTalkenator (variation of the Workshop template, using Gemini 2.5 Pro).

Abstract: “‘Legal personhood’ is thought to be a concept of foundational and systemic importance to the legal system, encompassing all living human beings, born alive, and certain collectivities called corporations. The problem is that the more one tries to square these uncontroversial intuitions with one another, the less the concept hangs together. Many things that we do not call ‘legal persons’ are treated in legally identical ways to entities that we do call ‘legal persons’—and entities within the class of ‘legal persons’ are treated in radically different ways among themselves. To be sure, we can call anything we want ‘legal persons’—but not without trivializing the concept.

This Chapter makes two claims. First, I argue that the concept of legal personhood, as currently understood, is not doing the work it is widely thought to. There is no account of why some entities are called ‘legal persons’ and others are not—at least not one consistent with the intuition that legal personhood is a systemically significant concept. Second, I argue that there is an organizationally foundational concept at the heart of our notion of legal personhood—the class of entities capable of participating in the law on their own terms. This class, comprised—at the moment and as far as we know—of only roughly cognitively healthy human adults, is narrower than the way in which the term ‘legal person’ is used. But it is a category that captures the foundational organizational role we have long presumed of the concept.”

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The enTalkenator PodcastBy Christian Turner