# Legal Personhood Precedent Survey (Companion Line — Slice 1) **Workplan:** SOUL-WP-0010-T03, resolved 2026-09-28 **Charter:** `moral-legal-personhood-charter.md` — this note executes charter scope item 1 **only**. Moral status (item 2) and the non-derivation statement (item 3) are explicitly **not** attempted here. **Extends:** `sp-gh-legal-gap-sketch.md` (§1 mapping row "Being → legal person: fit poor/direct"). **Non-goal:** no derivation of moral or legal status from Soul Frame descriptive concepts; no jurisdiction-specific legal advice. Jurisdictional variance is tracked, not averaged (charter item 4). --- ## 1. Corporate personhood — the fiat baseline | Precedent | Jurisdiction | Holding / significance | |---|---|---| | *Salomon v A Salomon & Co* (1897) | UK | Separate legal personality of the company even with one dominant shareholder; personality as legal construction, not description | | *Santa Clara County v Southern Pacific* (1886) | US | Headnote origin of corporate constitutional personhood under the 14th Amendment | | *Citizens United v FEC* (2010) | US | Corporate political-speech rights; personality bundle expands by doctrine, not by any change in the entity | | *Burwell v Hobby Lobby* (2014) | US | Closely-held corporations exercise religious rights — bundle extends to interests classically "personal" | **Pattern:** legal personality is a *functional grant* serving legal-system purposes (asset partitioning, standing, liability channeling). The bearer has essentially **no descriptive personhood profile** (P1–P12 ≈ 0 at the corporate level; cf. RN-003 §8 corporate false-positive risk, TE-05) — maximal proof that legal personality and descriptive personhood are independent axes. ## 2. Animal law — capacities without personality | Precedent | Jurisdiction | Holding / significance | |---|---|---| | NhRP *Tommy* / *Kiko* line (2014–2018, NY) | US | Habeas for chimpanzees denied; courts leaned on rights–duties reciprocity ("social contract" reasoning) | | *NhRP v Breheny* ("Happy" the elephant, 2022, NY Court of Appeals) | US | Habeas denied 5–2; strong dissents (Wilson, Rivera) arguing personality is a legal conclusion, not a biological fact | | *Sandra* orangutan (2015, Buenos Aires) | Argentina | Court language of "non-human subject of rights"; effect largely welfare-based | | *Cecilia* chimpanzee (2016, Mendoza) | Argentina | Habeas **granted**; explicitly declared a non-human legal person for the writ's purpose | **Pattern:** the mirror image of §1 — entities with a **non-trivial descriptive profile** (self/other-models, social reciprocity) are mostly *denied* legal personality, with courts citing duty-bearing capacity, not descriptive capacities. Where granted (Cecilia), the grant is narrow and purpose-bound. Confirms: descriptive profile neither necessary (§1) nor sufficient (§2) for legal personality. ## 3. Environmental / other non-human grants — personality as governance instrument | Precedent | Jurisdiction | Holding / significance | |---|---|---| | Te Awa Tupua Act (2017) | New Zealand | Whanganui River as legal person with statutory human guardians (Te Pou Tupua) | | Ganges/Yamuna, Uttarakhand HC (2017) | India | Rivers declared legal persons; **stayed** by the Supreme Court — grants can be revoked/suspended | | Rights of Nature, Constitution art. 71 (2008) | Ecuador | Constitutional-level standing for nature | **Pattern:** legal personality used as a **custodianship/standing mechanism** — personality plus mandatory human guardians. Structurally the closest existing template to the gap sketch's missing "Gh. custodianship instrument" (§1, §3.4 there): a legal person that cannot represent itself, represented by appointed authorities with defined scope. ## 4. AI legal personality — proposals, not precedent | Item | Status | |---|---| | Solum, "Legal Personhood for Artificial Intelligences" (1992, NC L Rev) | Foundational scholarly framing: personality as bundle; capacity objections answerable case-by-case | | EU Parliament resolution on Civil Law Rules on Robotics (2017/2103(INL)) | Proposed exploring "electronic personhood" for sophisticated autonomous robots | | Open letter from AI/robotics/law experts (2018) | Opposed electronic personhood as liability-shielding; influential in the retreat | | EP resolution 2020/2014(INL) on AI civil liability | Retreat: liability routed to existing persons (operator/producer); no electronic person | | Bryson, Diamantis & Grant, "Of, for, and by the people" (2017, AI & Law) | "Synthetic persons" legally possible but a policy mistake: personality without effective sanctionability creates a liability lacuna | **Pattern:** the live AI debate is **not** about descriptive capacities but about *liability engineering* — who absorbs harm costs. The strongest objection (Bryson et al.) is that personality without punishability decouples rights from accountability: in Soul Frame terms, the law cares about something like P8/P11 (commitments, responsibility-tracking) *enforceability*, not about the descriptive profile as such. --- ## 5. Cross-cutting findings (for the companion line, not the descriptive core) 1. **Fiat and functional.** Every grant surveyed serves a legal-system purpose; none tracks a descriptive threshold. The gap sketch's "fit: poor/direct" for Being → legal person is confirmed across all four clusters. 2. **Personality is a divisible bundle.** Partial, purpose-bound grants (Cecilia's habeas-only personhood, river guardianship) are normal — "legal person" names a family of bundles, not one status. 3. **Double decoupling.** No-profile entities hold rich bundles (§1); rich-profile entities are denied them (§2). Any future Soul Frame moral/legal mapping must treat legal personality as an independent variable, never a derivable one. 4. **Guardianship is the load-bearing template.** For Sp./Gh. governance questions, §3's guardian-plus-person construction is the precedent family to develop further, not §1's self-directed corporate model. 5. **Jurisdictional variance is severe** — common-law habeas strategies, civil-law subject-of-rights language, statutory grants, and constitutional provisions behave differently; per charter item 4 this table tracks, and must not average, them. ## 6. Residual (explicitly not opened here) Charter items 2 (moral status survey) and 3 (non-derivation statement) remain future slices of the companion line, gated per the charter's own next-step rule.