Course overview
Law interprets our social, political and physical beings in ways which determine our most basic rights and obligations as legal persons. This course aims to develop in students an informed, coherent and critical understanding of the legal fiction of the person and the role of that fiction in Western law. It will trace the legal person through a number of core and elective courses of the curriculum in order to show a) how law variously attributes characteristics to its subject and b) how those attributed qualities of the person serve to justify and rationalise the very priorities and forms of law. The course will also have strong comparative and historical dimensions: it will foster an appreciation of changes in the idea of the legal person across States and cultures, and through time.