ABSTRACT
This chapter nonetheless attempts to sketch a biography of sorts for the figure within the confines of American law. It points to the nineteenth century as a formative era in the life of the legal person and emphasizes the ways and means it became a site of cultural contestation. The chapter begins by taking notice of the fact that the law that the young republic inherited from England spoke in the plural of persons, organizing them hierarchically, in accordance with a more basic set of presuppositions about a divinely preordained chain of being. It concludes with some reflections about the cultural significance and distributive consequences of the law's presumption of sanity, finding in the treatise literature a studied ambiguity about the place of consciousness in the structure of liability, expressive of a deeper ambivalence about the status of mental disability as an excusing condition.
