Legal Personhood Reading Group Semester 2, 2026

Decolonising Legal Personhood

Historic constructions of legal personhood in Western legal frameworks have been strongly influenced by a small group of people experiencing extreme power and privilege: white, Western, able-bodied, straight, cis-gender men. Their role is clear in any review of accepted canonical literature on legal personhood, but their positionality is not often acknowledged. In addition to their individual positions, these men who were writing and thinking about legal personhood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were also largely members of colonising countries. Their thinking and the laws about which they were theorising were being forcibly imposed on the citizens of colonised countries around the world. As Ngaire Naffine notes, there is often a failure to explicitly acknowledge these intertwined power dynamics in the scholarship on legal personhood. In this reading group, we seek to explore the literature in a manner that allows us to acknowledge the real harm that European coloniality has caused via its construction of legal personhood. We will be using a decolonial lens to explore this Eurocentric definition of legal personhood that, at least in part, has been imposed on many legal systems by the hegemonic nature of the Western legal tradition. We explore its impact as a weapon of colonisation, as well as its ongoing impact on society, more broadly - especially in the context of marginalised groups.

This reading group will be convened by Associate Professor Anna Arstein-Kerslake and Associate Professor Erin O'Donnell.

Reading Group sessions will be held on Tuesdays at 1.00pm-2.00pm at Melbourne Law School on the following dates:

• 4 August (Room 831, Level 8)
• 25 August (Room GM19, Mezzanine)
• 6 October (Room 831, Level 8)
• 20 October (Room 831, Level 8)
• 25 November (Room 831, Level 8)

Register here!