Agency in Law

Project Information

LEGACY

Grant agreement ID: 101116635

DOI

10.3030/101116635

EC signature date 24 September 2023

Start date 1 January 2024

End date 31 December 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 496 595,00

EU contribution

€ 1 496 595,00

Coordinated by

HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Finland

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - LEGACY (Agency in Law)

Reporting period: 2024-01-01 to 2026-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project on Agency in Law (LEGACY) probes and problematizes the legal notion of agency, deeply embedded in Western legal systems and situated within a liberal tradition of political and legal philosophy. In this view, legal agency – the capacity to be held responsible and to perform legally valid acts – has been reserved for adult human beings deemed to be of sound mind. Liberal Agency has recently come under increasing criticism and challenges. Many now argue that persons with disabilities, children, artificial intelligence systems and/or nonhuman animals could in fact be treated as agents. The main aim of LEGACY is to achieve a comprehensive, rigorous, and historically informed understanding of legal agency. This overall understanding will be reached by accomplishing three objectives. The first objective is the creation of a historical account of the birth, development and spread of Liberal Agency in law, as well as its historical challengers. The second objective is to scrutinize legal agency in the contemporary context through thematic analyses of agency. Finally, LEGACY will develop a completely new theory of legal agency that provides an overall synthesis of the different accounts and can explain, reconcile and/or solve the contemporary challenges to our understanding of agency.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project has so far progressed well toward the set objectives. In terms of objective 1, the project has focused on the development of agency in early modernity. The project has advance objective 2 by producing analyses of topical issues related to legal agency (ie. legal agency of AI systems and animal agency) through scientific publications. The project researchers are currently co-editing a special issue on the topic for the journal Theory and Practice of Legislation and book proposal on the topic on philosophical foundations of legal personhood.

As regards objective 3, the project is currently preparing publications where an outline of the planned theory will be introduced for the first time and where the overall theory of legal agency will be presented.

The project has disseminated its results by participating in conferences and organising one conference, but also holding presentations in other scientific events.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project has generated results that cut across previously siloed debates in legal theory. Discussions of legal agency have recently developed in relative isolation from one another — scholars working on corporate and group agency, AI legal status, and the expanding legal agency of persons with disabilities have rarely engaged across these boundaries. LEGACY has begun to bridge these conversations, creating a unified analytical space where the structural similarities and differences between these cases can be examined systematically.

A central preliminary result is the ongoing development of a framework for legal agency that offers criteria for distinguishing between different types of agency arrangements. For instance, the expanding legal agency of persons with disabilities is in many ways different to the developing status of AI systems. The project has also produced early results on the historical emergence of the modern conception of legal agency,.

Further uptake of these results would benefit from engagement with legal practitioners and policymakers working on topics such as AI liability and disability rights frameworks, as well as continued dialogue with comparative law scholars across jurisdictions.