Lisa Siraganian, "The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots" (Verso, 2026)

Apr 14, 2026

Lisa Siraganian, a humanities scholar and professor at Johns Hopkins, explores how legal fictions reshape who counts as a person. She traces corporate personhood’s influence on rights for trees, fetuses, and robots. Short conversations probe environmental personhood, AI citizenship stunts, and alternatives that stress duties and political solidarity.

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INSIGHT

Expansive Personhood Mirrors Corporate Law

Expansive legal personhood is following the corporate personhood model rather than human-rights frameworks.
Lisa Siraganian traces this shift from 1970s legal arguments to Citizens United, showing nonhuman personhood borrows corporate legal structures.

INSIGHT

Corporate Personhood Originated To Shield Investment

Corporate personhood emerged with industrial capitalism to protect large-scale investment through features like limited liability.
Siraganian links that 19th-century development to the modern legal fiction that now gets repurposed for nonhuman claims.

INSIGHT

Two Traits Drive Hollowed Out Personhood

Personhood debates often reduce criteria to uniqueness and moral significance while dropping duties, social roles, and reflective agency.
Siraganian uses Antonio Lelardo's five-personhood traits to show how fetal personhood keeps only DNA-based individuality and value.

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Over the last twenty-five years, the concept of per-sonhood has become central to many contentious debates. Corporations have won free speech protections, as if they were individuals. The right to life or freedom has been claimed on behalf of fetuses, trees, and elephants. The fund of human rights is spilling over into the nonhuman.
Lisa Siraganian’s The Problem of Personhood: Giving Rights to Trees, Corporations, and Robots (Verso, 2026) reveals the unsettling consequences of granting rights to imagined persons, such as Sophia the robot citizen or New Zealand’s Whanganui River. Synthesizing the political and philosophical debates on personhood and drawing on a varied cast of thinkers that includes Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Dr. Seuss, Siraganian uncovers the disturbing impact of this contemporary development. Awarding rights to robots and rivers all too easily becomes a legal tool to turn people into capital. When robot Sophia is made a citizen, “she” is transformed into a subject in the law without the corresponding legal duties that protect us from her.
At the root of this trend is the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling that grants First Amendment rights to corporations as if they were individuals. The result has not been the transformation of things into humans so much as humans into things, when animals and the environment would be better protected with reference to our humanity rather than to theirs.

Lisa Siraganian is the J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in Humanities and Professor in the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland, USA). Her work has won multiple awards and has been supported by fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Siraganian has written award-winning scholarly monographs that bridge literary criticism, art criticism, and legal and philosophical scholarship. More recently, she was the Editor of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, 10th edition, Volume D (1914-1945) (2022).

Tim Wyman-McCarthy is a Lecturer in the discipline of Human Rights and Associate Director of Graduate Studies at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights and the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. He can be reached at tw2468@columbia.edu.

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