This chapter critically examines the treatment of concepts of legal personality and representation provided by the great (if lamentably now mostly forgotten) German realist phenomenologist Adolf Reinach. In The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law (1913), Reinach offers what is meant to be a phenomenological elucidation of the a priori nature (essential formal characteristics) of a wide variety of foundational legal concepts, the latter understood as denoting distinctive modalities of speech act. The primary interest of the chapter lies in the analysis that Reinach provides of concepts of personality and representation. However, one cannot understand what is distinctive in – and distinctively compelling or puzzling about – Reinach’s analysis of these concepts without appreciating what is distinctive about his general methodology of conceptual analysis (i.e., his phenomenological, speech act theoretical understanding of social behavior denoted by legal concepts). Thus, in addition to examining Reinach’s views on persons, legal personhood, and legal representation, the chapter provides a critical introduction to Reinachian conceptual analysis and explains its enduring interest for contemporary private law theory.

In 2010s Citizens United, the Supreme Court held that corporations do indeed have a right to freedom of speech, just as regular citizens do, and that the government could not restrict expenditures based on an entity’s corporate identity. Citizens United thereby allowed corporate donations to flood into elections. In her feminist judgement, Carliss Chatman breaks with the original opinion and refuses to extend the political speech rights of individuals to corporations. She grounds her analysis in the injustice of affording full personhood rights to corporations – which are artificial persons – even as natural persons like women and minorities have historically not enjoyed such rights and continue to suffer inequality. Amy Sepinwall’s commentary situates and contextualizes the feminist judgment, and then questions a key premise. She suggests an alternate feminist approach focusing on the right of the listener to hear from all perspectives, rather than having one side use spending to dominate – and drown out – other voices.