The Radial Conception of Legal Personhood in Seven Theses

This paper summarizes the Radial Conception of legal personhood in seven theses. On this view, legal personhood resists checklist definitions; it is a category anchored in a paradigmatic central case formed by the convergence of entrenched (and idealised) models of the world. This structure yields prototype effects, establishing the central case as a cognitive reference point — a default benchmark for reasoning about legal personhood. The salience of the central case — together with the human mind’s imaginative, embodied modes of categorisation — shapes, but does not fix, the motivated pathways by which legal personhood extends to peripheral entities serving analogous institutional functions.