Inventing Legal Persons

In his 1998 book, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, literary critic Harold Bloom made the bold claim that the plays of William Shakespeare represented human character and personality in language to such an extent that they “invent[ed] the human as we know it.” While the book’s defense of its thesis leaves much to be desired, Bloom’s observation that that the representation of personality in the form of language influences, and perhaps invents, the self-conceptualization of a human person, is an interesting one and provides ample implication for the semiotics of law. Much like literature, law’s subjects also consist of persons, with the substance of law describing the relationships between these persons. Further, law also has the task of representing characters and their personality through the means of language. In this way, the law of a community may provide an influence on how persons within a community conceive of themselves as persons. In this work, I will argue that laws, to some extent, invent a human being’s conception of itself as a person. While law may not be the only influence of this self-conception, it is an important tool. I will begin with a short discussion of my aesthetic theory of law as “world projection” borrowing from the aesthetic theory of Nicholas Wolterstorff. From there, I will discuss how laws are meant to shape the proper conduct of relationships between persons, projecting that idealized form of relationship, and communicating it to observers. From this, I will discuss how the shaping of these relationships also influence the ways persons conceive of themselves as agents entering into such relationships. Finally, in order to better understand the way that law shapes persons through relationships, I will discuss the legal fiction of the corporate person.