KDEC 9670 - Persons, Things and Rights: Unravelling the Universe of Private Law

Since the beginnings of the Western legal tradition (both the civil and, less directly, the common law), private law has been structured around three fundamental notions: “person”, “thing” and “right”. These have become so ubiquitous that we rarely pause to ponder their meaning and, just as importantly, the relation between them. Either we accept traditional but defective definitions (eg. a person is a subject of rights, a thing is a subject of rights), or we accept there is no stable definition and move on. Yet returning to this foundational tripartition is key to unlocking a number of questions that have either long posed themselves or have more recently emerged. For instance:

• the status of “a-typical” human material (corpses, the unborn, body parts, genetic material, etc.)
• immaterial property (information, reputation, shares, money, cryptocurrencies, goodwill, etc.), and whether these are properly “objects of property”
• the nature of “intellectual property”
• whether rights can be owned, possessed, sold, etc.
• whether corporations have fundamental rights or can be criminally liable
• the rights of animals or nature.

It is some of these questions, and others, that this course seeks to unpack, revealing the big picture of the law and the permanence of key considerations from a comparative and theoretical perspective. This course will be of interest to students wanting to understand the law on a deeper level, revealing what American judge O.W. Holmes called “simplicity on the other side of complexity”.

None. Students must be prepared to do catch-up reading if they are not sufficiently familiar with some relevant aspects of the course’s legal background.

Seminars with student participation.

• 1hr mid-term written test (1/3 of final mark)
• 2hr table exam at the end of semester (2/3 of final mark)
• discretionary extra point or half point (out of 20) for those who have contributed in a particularly consistent way to weekly class discussion.