The paper presents a semiotic interpretation of the phenomenological debate on the notion of person, focusing in particular on Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Edith Stein. The semiotic interpretation lets us identify the categories that orient the debate: collective/individual and subject/object. As we will see, the phenomenological analysis of the relation between person and social units such as the community, the association, and the mass shows similarities to contemporary socio-semiotic models. The difference between community, association, and mass provides an explanation (...) for the establishment of legal systems. The notion of person we inherit from phenomenology can also be useful in facing juridical problems raised by the use of non-human decision-makers such as machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence applications. (shrink)