ABSTRACT
This chapter commences with a historical account of legal personhood that backgrounds Western legal traditions, including the philosophical underpinnings of recognising personhood in a legal sense. This account will develop the theme that personhood as a Western legal construct is not a repository of universally accepted rights or duties, and that the concept of legal personality stripped of societal context, rather than providing an answer to the question of rights, merely raises more questions. The account will then consider the influence of international law, from which much of the current rights-based thinking originates. The chapter will then discuss the concept of legal personhood in domestic law as it relates to natural and artificial legal persons and will focus particularly on incidents of legal personality applied to non-human animals and elements of the natural world.
