Emergence and Personification

Guest speaker: Professor Gunther Teubner.
He will present remotely via Zoom.

Emergent worlds present the law with the challenge that it cannot gain communicative access to them due to the incompatibility of their elementary operations.

Can the law nevertheless make novel non-human entities - collective actors, bio-social associations or algorithmic computations - speak? This is where personification comes in. Personification allows the law to "internalise" emergent non-human entities as quasi-actors, albeit not these entities themselves, but only as semantic artefacts, i.e. "persons".

These person-fictions become attribution addresses for legal acts. Moreover, personification triggers a new dynamic in which emergent phenomena outside the law become fully-fledged communication partners within the law. They participate directly in legal communication.

Finally, the internal legal communication with the new participants, in turn, generates external legal effects on the substrate. Mutual influences of internal and external legal processes develop, which ultimately create an independent co-evolution of legal persons and their substrates.

The personification of algorithms and biosocial associations is analyzed in more detail in two case studies.