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

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Apr 14, 2026

Lisa Siraganian, a Johns Hopkins scholar trained in law and comparative thought, explores how extending personhood to corporations, trees, fetuses, and robots reshapes law and politics. She traces corporate personhood’s history, critiques environmental and AI personhood, and argues for focusing on duties, collective publicness, and human-centered protection instead of magical legal fictions.

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INSIGHT

Expansive Personhood Mirrors Corporate Law

Expansive legal personhood copies the corporate model rather than human rights frameworks.
Lisa Siraganian traces modern expansive personhood from 1970s legal strategies that use corporate precedents to grant rights to rivers, fetuses, and robots.

INSIGHT

Limited Liability Shaped Corporate Personhood

Corporate personhood emerged to protect large-scale investment and provide limited liability for shareholders.
Siraganian links this 19th-century development to why law treats corporations as artificial persons with special protections.

INSIGHT

Fetal Personhood Reduces Personhood To DNA

Expansive personhood selects only individuality and moral significance, dropping duties, social roles, and reflective selfhood.
This reduction makes fetuses ideal legal 'persons' by DNA uniqueness while erasing pregnant persons' social and bodily entanglement.

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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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