In this paper, we provide an analysis of the concept of legal personality and discuss whether personality may be conferred on artificial intelligence systems (AIs). Legal personality will be presented as a doctrinal category that holds together bundles of rights and obligations; as a result, we first frame it as a node of inferential links between factual preconditions and legal effects. However, this inferentialist reading does not account for the ‘background reasons’ of legal personality, i.e., it does not explain why (...) we cluster different situations under this doctrinal category and how extra-legal information is integrated into it. We argue that one way to account for this background is to adopt a neoinstitutional perspective and to update the ontology of legal concepts with a further layer, the meta-institutional one. We finally argue that meta-institutional concepts can also support us in finding an equilibrium around the legal-policy choices that are involved in including (or not including) AIs among legal persons. (shrink)

We have taken a look at the rules of games in order to acquire some knowledge concerning constitutive rules and, probably, institutional phenomena in general. In this paper we tried to elaborate a system account of constitutive rules. We claim that all accounts that put emphasis on the form of rules are vulnerable. It appears that constitutive rules are interconnected and always form a system that can be internally differentiated. Thanks to adopting certain qualitative criterion we were able to distinguish (...) central and peripheral constitutive rules. Moreover, that very account makes it possible to distinguish between different types of practices that are determined by types of systems of rules. Secondly, it appears there are three “layers” of games that should not be confused: deep conventions, constitutive rules that establish the game and determine games’ identities, and “rules of efficiency” that are some sort of recommendations as to how to play well. (shrink)

In this article I am going to argue that despite the fact that (1) there is nothing specific to the form of constitutive rules and (2) that in some broad sense every rule has a constitutive aspect, there is a substantial difference between what might be called trivially and genuinely constitutive rules, and the difference can be spotted by looking at practices that rules are supposed to constitute, not at these rules.