Details of Professor Annelise Riles's Munro Lecture. Event details Lecture title: The Legal Person: An Anthropological Approach to Corporate Debt Date: 4 December 2008, 5.15pm Venue: Faculty Room South, David Hume Tower, George Square, Edinburgh Lecture abstract What might anthropological notions of personhood tell us about the nature of legal personhood, as exemplified by corporations and corporate debt? This lecture argues that an anthropological focus on the legal nature of personhood can illuminate corporate debt relations. The legal person takes a particular form: from the outside it is a person, "simplified," and a subject of jural relations; from the inside, it is a "thing," property, a target and an artifact of legal technique. Through an example of the legal status of the ie in Japan, this lecture presents legal personification as a process of creating boundaries between inside and outside which renders agents or transactors as "opaque" sets of relations an effect which in turn has significant political and economic consequences. This article was published on 2024-08-28
