The ERC-funded 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.
The project will deliver a historical account of the birth, development and spread of Liberal Agency in law, as well as its historical challengers. No such comprehensive study currently exists. Such a study will be relevant not only to legal and intellectual historians but also to scholars working on agency-related topics within law, philosophy, and cognate fields.
The project will scrutinize legal agency in the contemporary context through three thematic analyses of agency, which incorporate and conceptualize the historical insights with a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary discourses. These contemporary discourses are in need of careful, theoretically robust legal accounts. Furthermore, they lack proper historical contextualization. The analytical accounts resulting from LEGACY have the potential to become central in their respective fields.
This subproject will focus on the agency of individual human beings. It will scrutinize Liberal Agency from this perspective, focusing on the liberal assumptions of rationality and atomism, and how they are increasingly being challenged by relational accounts of agency on one hand, and technological development on the other.
This subproject will investigate the notion of animal agency, seeking to combine the recent philosophical ideas and the sparse existing legal work to produce a comprehensive and rigorous account of what the legal recognition of animal agency could mean.
This subproject will focus on AIs and groups as legal agents, contrasting them with the relevant features of Liberal Agency: humanity, individualism and atomism.
The project 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. The most significant breakthrough potential lies in this objective. Such a theory has the potential to become truly foundational for a contemporary understanding of legal agency, unifying the various discourses.