ABSTRACT
It is normal to note in a technical sense that jurisdiction is not a power over events or disputes per se but typically a power over persons. For lawyers, this means nothing more than the fact that jurisdiction is supposed to be given by the valid service of a writ or originating process on a defendant. It remains a practical problem of bringing your adversary before a particular court. But for philosophers and legal theorists the problem is often of a separate order altogether. What constitutes a legal person? What are the foundations of personal responsibility? What is legal personhood? In a sense, the questions that scholars pose about a ‘Law of Persons’ are no less litigious than those which belong to juridical institutions themselves. In fact, one could suggest that they become litigious on a different scale-not content to have authority staged and exercised in a discrete forum and over a definite opponent, philosophical questioning seeks to enact its authority in a transcendent register and in the order of ‘truth’.
