Autonomous Corporate Personhood

59 Pages Posted: 5 Mar 2021 Last revised: 16 Feb 2022

See all articles by Carla Reyes

Carla Reyes

Southern Methodist University - Dedman School of Law

Date Written: 2021

Abstract

Currently, several states are considering changes to their business organization law to accommodate autonomous businesses—businesses operated entirely through computer code. Several international civil society groups are also actively developing new frameworks and a model law for enabling decentralized, autonomous businesses to achieve a corporate or corporate-like status that bestows legal personhood. Meanwhile, various jurisdictions, including the European Union, have considered whether and to what extent artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly should be endowed with personhood in order to respond to AI’s increasing presence in society. Despite the fairly obvious overlap between the two sets of inquiries, the legal and policy discussions between the two only rarely overlap. As a result of this failure to communicate, both areas of personhood theory fail to account for the important role that socio-technical and socio-legal context plays for law and policy development. This Article fills the gap by investigating the limits of artificial rights at the intersection of corporations and artificial intelligence. Specifically, this Article argues that building a comprehensive legal approach to artificial rights—rights enjoyed by artificial people, whether entity, machine, or otherwise—requires approaching the issue through a systems lens to ensure law’s consideration of the varied socio-technical contexts in which artificial people exist.

To make these claims, this Article first establishes a baseline of terminology, emphasizes the importance of viewing AI as part of a socio-technical system, and reviews the existing market for autonomous corporations. Sections II and III then examine the existing debates around both artificially intelligent persons and corporate personhood, arguing that the socio-legal needs driving artificial personhood debates in both contexts include: protecting the rights of natural people, upholding social values, and creating a fiction for legal convenience. Sections II and III explore the extent to which the theories from either set of literature fits the reality of autonomous businesses, illuminating gaps and using them to demonstrate that the law must consider the socio-technical context of AI systems and the socio-legal complexity of corporations to decide how autonomous businesses will interact with the world. Ultimately, the Article identifies links between both areas of legal personhood, leveraging those links to demonstrate the Article’s core claim: developing law for artificial systems in any context should use the systems nature of the artificial artifact to tie its legal treatment directly to the system’s socio-technical reality.

Keywords: corporations, personhood, artificial intelligence, corporate governance

Suggested Citation

Reyes, Carla, Autonomous Corporate Personhood (2021). 96 Wash. L. Rev. 1453 (2021), SMU Dedman School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 496, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3776481

Carla Reyes (Contact Author)

Southern Methodist University - Dedman School of Law ( email )

P.O. Box 750116
Dallas, TX 75275
United States

HOME PAGE: http://bit.ly/Reyes-Carla-L

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
490
Abstract Views
2,038
Rank
107,142
PlumX Metrics