Agency in Law

Informazioni relative al progetto

LEGACY

ID dell’accordo di sovvenzione: 101116635

DOI

10.3030/101116635

Data della firma CE 24 Settembre 2023

Data di avvio 1 Gennaio 2024

Data di completamento 31 Dicembre 2028

Finanziato da

• European Research Council (ERC)

Costo totale

€ 1 496 595,00

Contributo UE

€ 1 496 595,00

Coordinato da

HELSINGIN YLIOPISTO
Finland

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

Periodo di rendicontazione: 2024-01-01 al 2026-06-30

Sintesi del contesto e degli obiettivi generali del progetto

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.

Lavoro eseguito dall’inizio del progetto fino alla fine del periodo coperto dalla relazione e principali risultati finora ottenuti

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.

Progressi oltre lo stato dell’arte e potenziale impatto previsto (incluso l’impatto socioeconomico e le implicazioni sociali più ampie del progetto fino ad ora)

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.