Spirit are you there ? The legal personification of non-human entities
Résumé
How is the mind, understood in the broad sense (metaphysical, psychic, cognitive, or artificial), taken into account in the legal personification of non-humans ?
By distinguishing the register of discourse from that of law, we shall return to what is meant by "legal person" in a Kelsenian conception and ask whether and under what conditions law can grasp what is "invisible" or what does not exist - according to a certain ontology. To what extent is law constrained by a prior ontology ? Can it attribute a legal personality to ghosts, spiritual creatures, protect the "well being" of a river or recognize a "psychic harm" to robots ?
Starting from positive law, we will propose the hypothesis of the emergence of a "psychepolitics reinforced" by the contemporary legal framework of the human mind extended to the non-human.