Human Rights, Legal Personhood and the Impersonality of Embodied Life

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel E. Vatter ◽  
Marc De Leeuw
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Legal Personhood

scholarly journals Teaching Mohamedou Ould Slahi's Guantánamo Diary in the Human Rights and Literature Classroom

2016 ◽  
Vol 104 ◽  
pp. 27-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Schultheis Moore
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Political Context ◽  
Literature Classroom ◽  
State Security ◽  
Legal Personhood

This essay provides a case study of Slahi's Guantanamo Diary in order to demonstrate how a literary approach to contribute to the study of human rights by both demonstrating the necessity of human rights discourses and the ways in which they must be reconsidered in the current geopolitical moment. More specifically, I argue that reading the book in its larger legal and political context unveils the ideologies that promote torture in the name of state security. And, it offers a rebuttal to those ideologies through a critical analysis of the distribution of legal personhood and literary subjectivity in the context of Guantánamo.

scholarly journals LawasMagic. Some Thoughts on Ghosts, Non-Humans, and Shamans

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 1247-1276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexis Alvarez-Nakagawa
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Legal History ◽  
Military Dictatorship ◽  
Legal Cases ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Real Effects ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
Legal Domain ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Relationship

Legal metamorphoses between persons/things have been recurrent in history: Persons can become things, animals can turn into persons, and even ghosts can obtain personhood in the legal domain. Law would work then as a form of magic, a powerful instrument to create realities that, although fictional, have very real effects. Drawing on anthropology and legal scholarship, I will show the links between law and magic. In this endeavor, I examine two groups of legal cases from Argentina where people and animals respectively obtained personhood through the magic of law. First, I analyze the so-called human rights trials that are judging the crimes of the last military dictatorship (1976–1983), and I argue that these are working to restore the legal personhood of those who enforcedly disappeared. Second, I examine a series of judgments that have recently ruled—for the first time in modern legal history—that orangutans, chimps, and elephants are “nonhuman persons.” I conclude this Paper by contrasting legal magic with shamanic practices. I argue that even if these two are linked, it is possible to find in some forms of shamanism a different way of framing the relationship between persons/things that can offer an alternative (to) law.

scholarly journals Collectivities as Legal Persons

2019 ◽  
pp. 155-174
Author(s):  
Visa A.J. Kurki
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Social Ontology ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
Group Agents ◽  
Orthodox View

This chapter examines corporate legal personhood as well as the legal status of collectivities in general. It exposes a number of problems the Orthodox View has as regards the rights and duties of collectivities. For instance, many constitutions and human rights documents recognize the rights of minorities, but minorities are regardless generally not taken to be corporations or legal persons. The chapter offers a different explanation of corporations. It applies social ontology to argue that even non-incorporated group agents can hold legal rights. Regardless, such groups are not legal persons. What distinguishes corporations from other groups is not that they hold rights, but rather that they are endowed with a significant number of the incidents of legal personhood: they can own property, sue, and so on. The chapter concludes by considering whether collectives that are not group agents could be legal persons.

scholarly journals Subject (in) Trouble: Humans, Robots, and Legal Imagination

Laws ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
Legal Issues ◽  
High Tech ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
Legal Subjectivity ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Right

The legal conception and interpretation of the subject of law have long been challenged by different theoretical backgrounds: from the feminist critiques of the patriarchal nature of law and its subjects to the Marxist critiques of its capitalist ideological nature and the anti-racist critiques of its colonial nature. These perspectives are, in turn, challenged by anarchist, queer, and crip conceptions that, while compelling a critical return to the subject, the structure and the law also serve as an inspiration for arguments that deplete the structures and render them hostages of the sovereignty of the subject’ self-fiction. Identity Wars (a possible epithet for this political and epistemological battle to establish meaning through which power is exercised) have, for their part, been challenged by a renewed axiological consensus, here introduced by posthuman critical theory: species hierarchy and anthropocentric exceptionalism. As concepts and matter, questioning human exceptionalism has created new legal issues: from ecosexual weddings with the sea, the sun, or a horse; to human rights of animals; to granting legal personhood to nature; to human rights of machines, inter alia the right to (or not to) consent. Part of a wider movement on legal theory, which extends the notion of legal subjectivity to non-human agents, the subject is increasingly in trouble. From Science Fiction to hyperrealist materialism, this paper intends to signal some of the normative problems introduced, firstly, by the sovereignty of the subject’s self-fiction; and, secondly, by the anthropomorphization of high-tech robotics.

Freedom to negotiate: a proposal extricating ‘capacity’ from ‘consent’

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liz Brosnan ◽  
Eilionóir Flynn
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Informed Consent ◽  
Mental Capacity ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Undue Influence ◽  
Legal Personhood ◽  
Perspective Drawing ◽  
Valid Consent ◽  
Validity Criteria ◽  
Human Rights Standards

AbstractIn this paper, we seek to radically reframe the legal construct of consent from a disability perspective. Drawing on feminist scholarship and human rights standards around ‘free and informed consent’, we apply a concept of freedom to negotiate to laws regulating both consent to sex and medical treatment – key areas in which the legal agency of people with disabilities (especially people with cognitive disabilities) is routinely denied, restricted or ignored. We set out the essential ingredients for reframing consent: namely, legal personhood, freedom to negotiate and understanding. We also outline conditions (i.e. coercion, undue influence and power imbalances) that impede valid consent. This represents a first attempt to move beyond labelling adults with certain disabilities as lacking the ‘mental capacity’ necessary to give valid consent – in order to explore in more depth particular expressions of consent or refusal and seek new validity criteria, beyond the label of ‘mental incapacity’.

Human Rights and Law

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramesh Kumar Tiwari
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights
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