A constitutivist account of legal personhood and nonhuman rights

On an orthodox account of the concept, legal personality is necessary pre-requisite status for a being/entity to be conceptually capable of bearing legal rights. The concept is comparatively under-theorised in anglophone scholarship, though what work does exist largely adopts the legal positivist position that the status is separate from moral considerations. 

This paper will question this assumption, and engage with the concept of legal personhood from the constitutivist position – the idea that moral requirements are located within the concept of agency. Drawing on the author’s previous monograph, which was awarded the European Award for Legal Theory in 2023, the account will sketch an overview of legal personality that would be acceptable to the constitutivist. It will then address what this means for the scope of rights-holders under existing rights instruments, using nonhuman animals as a case study. 

This paper will be developed into a monograph during the 2026/27 Academic Year, for which the author has received a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

Joshua Jowitt

Josh is a Senior Lecturer working in legal theory at Newcastle Law School in the United Kingdom. His current research interest is in the concept of legal personhood in the constitutivist tradition and builds on his previous monograph Agency, Morality and Law, which was awarded the European Award for Legal Theory in 2023. He has spent time as a visiting researcher at the Library of Congress; the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law; and the Cambridge Centre for Animal Rights Law.

His work has led to him being invited by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics to join their working group on research using neural organoids. He is a past convenor of the Jurisprudence (now ‘Legal Theory’) subject section within the Society of Legal Scholars, and serves as an institutional chair in the Juris North legal and political philosophy discussion group. He was the first in his family to attend university and remains heavily involved in outreach work to encourage greater participation in legal study from underrepresented groups.

Eliza Bechtold

Dr Bechtold is the Programmes Manager and a Research Fellow at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights.  She researches in the area of freedom of expression at the national, regional, and international levels and is particularly interested in the regulation of extreme speech in the digital age and how free speech frameworks can function to undermine democratic norms and institutions.  

Prior to entering academia, Dr Bechtold practiced law in the United States for nearly a decade, working as a litigation associate for law firms, including DLA Piper LLP, and serving as the Legal Director of the ACLU of New Mexico.  While working for the ACLU of New Mexico, she litigated human rights cases before federal and state courts and engaged in advocacy efforts throughout the state in relation to LGBTQ rights, immigrants' rights, and reproductive freedom.