Structuring Concepts of Legal Personhood: On Legal Personhood as a Cluster Property

Legal persons have traditionally been understood as entities with legal rights and/or duties. This traditional concept of legal personhood has been challenged during the last decades: In legal practice through the global development in law where previous legal non-persons such as different non-human natural entities, non-human animals, fetuses and artificial intelligences have been ascribed, or been proposed to be ascribed, legal rights and/or status as legal persons; in legal theory through, inter alia, Visa Kurki’s Bundle Theory of Legal Personhood. The purpose of this paper is to critically assess the concept of legal personhood proposed in the Bundle Theory. After discussing the definitional structured traditional concepts of legal personhood and Kurki’s argument against them, I will focus on the first main tenet of the Bundle Theory: That legal personhood is a prototype structured cluster property which consists of incidents which are separate but interconnected. I will argue that such a concept is untenable since the legal personhood of legal persons in positive law is not structured in this way. Lastly, I will suggest the use of a dual structured concept of legal personhood that maintains the benefits of previous concepts but avoids their major deficiencies.