The U.S. legal system has historically attributed moral personhood to a wide circle of entities. Among them, for instance, are gods and sovereigns, religious artifacts, sacred sites, national monuments, flags, corpses, and effigies. The law has narrowed this circle of moral concern over time. But its historical personhood conceptions continue to shape many entities’ legal status today. And this legacy holds lessons for contemporary debates over the personhood and property status of natural landscapes, fetuses, AI systems, and more.

Lily Hu is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. Her current projects broadly concern causal theorizing about the social world, with a particular focus on causal inference methodologies in the social sciences, how these various statistical frameworks treat and measure the “causal effect” of social categories such as race, and ultimately, how such methods are seen to back normative claims about racial discrimination and inequalities broadly.

Liane Huttner is a legal scholar with research interests in data protection law, digital law and AI. She holds a PhD from University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. She has previously been a visiting scholar at the Institute of European and Comparative Law, University of Oxford, and at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg.