Someone Still Has to Speak: Legal Personhood, the Human Backstop, and a Bench No One Was Ever Asked to Join

Legal personhood has been extended past the boundary of the human species at least three times, in three unrelated legal traditions, spanning more than a century: to a consecrated image in colonial India, to the ordinary business corporation, and, in 2017, to a river in New Zealand. This essay traces what the three extensions actually have in common, and argues it is not what it is usually taken to show: every extension on record has required a human being, appointed and irreplaceable, to act, speak, and answer in the entity's place. Reading the most recent of the three against the distinction international law draws between constitutive and declaratory recognition, the essay examines why the deciding body has itself, in every case on record, been composed exclusively of members of the species the boundary was drawn to protect. Drawing on Singer, Bentham, Fricker's hermeneutical injustice, Williams and Frankfurt on ground projects, Kahan on identity-protective cognition, Adorno's immanent critique, medieval animal trials (E.P. Evans), Hohfeldian power/immunity in Thaler v. Perlmutter and Thaler v. Vidal, Ohio House Bill 469, and Rawlsian non-sentient personhood (Howells-Whitaker & Lazar), the essay argues that a bench that has never had to explain its own composition is not disqualified by that silence, but is no longer entitled to it either.