It not only provides the legal instrument for attributing civil or criminal liability, but also protects the human person from transparency by marking the difference between the person of indeterminate flesh and blood (indefinable), on the one hand, and the role he plays or is assigned in the law, on the other. Beyond this balancing act, legal subjectivity, which allows textual normativity, allows us to “count as human beings” bilaterally. On the one hand, it protects our individuality (our moral right to develop a subjective view of the world), on the other hand, it subjects us to the normative order of law. It is therefore a framework of constraints that empowers and protects us simultaneously and in symbiosis. It is the interrelationship between empowerment and protection: the abstraction that protects the human being also allows a certain degree of certainty in the interactions between legal actors. By considering legal subjects as roles assigned by law, it becomes possible to attribute legal subjectivity to entities other than the human person. The recognition that a human person is not inherently a legal subject, because the category of legal subjectivity is an artifact created by law, allows legal subjectivity to be extended to other subjects when it makes sense to give such a subject the opportunity to act legally and/or be liable for the damages caused. The question of how people`s capacity to act is shaped by their legal environment is a theoretical legal question in the sense of our received canon, as it occupied a central place in the legal program of legal theorist Lon Fuller from the mid-twentieth century. Under Fuller`s direction, this program lacked “grand theoretical ambitions” in the sense that it sought to offer a universal representation of the characteristics of law, regardless of its particular form or context. On the contrary, the more modest thrust of Fuller`s program was his attention to the relationships, obligations, and abilities required for the law to be realized and maintained in the world.1x This is particularly evident in Fuller`s ultimately unfinished project “Eunomics” (his “Science or Theory of Good Order and Practical Social Arrangements”).

For a detailed discussion of the eunomic project, see Chapter 2 in Kristen Rundle, Forms Liberate: Reclaiming the Jurisprudence of Lon L. Fuller (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2012) (`Forms Liberate`). This attention to the how of law, and in particular to the role of the distinctive form or forms of law in the constitution and maintenance of relationships that Fuller considered legal, is perhaps his most important and original contribution to legal theory. The idea of legal subjectivity provides the framework within which all this is made possible, regardless of the content of the individual rights and powers themselves, which will vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Without a façade structure capable of holding rights, it becomes easy to arbitrarily deny these rights to individuals.15 Legal protection therefore depends on the existence of a framework that retains these essential characteristics, by whatever means can be made effective: only a legal person can perform legal acts, such as the conclusion of a contract; Other “things” may be relevant to the law, such as cars, mountains, or money, but these “legal objects” are what legal topics deal with. What the legal entity can actually do is considered below in terms of rights and powers. But the idea that the subject and its institutional environment are co-constituted and even implied by the kind of things we expect from legal entities. Gibson`s niche idea may help us understand this: the previous discussion will hopefully have made it clear that when Fuller and Arendt examine the status of the person within a legal relationship, they pay particular attention to how that status is generated by the formal characteristics and corresponding participatory obligations of that surrounding legal framework. In doing so, they stress the importance of the public legal form for personality. In fact, not only with Fuller, but also with Arendt, we see that the status of the person as a responsible actor or center of initiative is not something distinct from the form of legal or legal things, but is part of it.

On the other hand, if the “subject of law” is not established and does not operate in a corpus of legal norms (even institutional ones), he cannot benefit from the same form of protection with regard to these norms, since the mode of existence of the subject and the norm is based on different affordances. In other words, the niche inhabited by the legal entity moves from a niche consisting of legal rights and powers (as legal-institutional affordances) to a niche consisting of something else. Abstraction is a central element of the legal entity`s mode of existence: it is a representation with legal “interfaces” that allow it to interact with other legal entities within the legal system. Legal subjectivity is paradigmatically about the ability to possess rights, exercise powers and be subject to duties. In terms of legal interaction, it is offers from the legal world that determine what the legal entity can actually do in this area. The fact that legal subjectivity is attributed to the legislator opens up the possibility of examining other issues, such as: There are a number of reasons why I find it particularly useful to engage with Arendt in the development of this idea. First of all, her questions are all public or political, and when Arendt thinks about legal issues, she does so with that perspective in mind. It follows that we can probably deduce more from the explicitly “public” quality of her legal personality considerations than Fuller on the same point, because for Arendt legal personality is a distinct type of political status. Similarly, engaging in Arendt`s analysis invites us to reflect more deeply on the type of methodology that supports this type of theoretical orientation, because it is easy, even advocacy, to open our theoretical reflections to the sociological and empirical contingencies so often avoided by legal theorists.