TITLE:
Image of the Beast: Legal Personhood, Autonomous Entities, and the Hermeneutics of Institutional Fiction
AUTHORS:
Ciprian Florin Pater
KEYWORDS:
Legal Personhood, Corporate Personhood, Autonomous Companies, GDPR Article 22, New Public Management, Legal Hermeneutics, Institutional Semantics, Algorithmic Accountability
JOURNAL NAME:
Beijing Law Review,
Vol.17 No.4,
November
10,
2026
ABSTRACT: This paper develops a legal-sociological account of legal personhood as an institutional and normative category whose justification is interpretively contestable, while acknowledging that within any given jurisdiction statutes and binding precedent supply determinate positive-law answers in decided cases. Through a genealogy of corporate personhood, an analysis of the 2026 Argentine draft that would attach personality to fully autonomous companies, a hermeneutic reading of maritime jurisdictional metaphor, and a critique of the New Public Management logic that can constrain, relocate, or automate administrative discretion, the paper proposes a triadic framework—Image, Mark, and Sovereignty—for tracking how representational systems mediate consequential decisions about biological persons. The framework is offered as a proposed operationalisation with specified decision domains, jurisdictions, unit of analysis, and a disconfirmation criterion, rather than as an already-falsifiable theory. See Section 51 for the full integrated statement.