In his Institutes, the Roman jurist Gaius wrote: “all of the law which we use concerns either persons or things or actions.” With the occasional modification, this is the way in which both the common law and civil law still divide the world—the fundamental classification is between person and thing.
I visualize this divide as a thick legal wall. On one side are things. Their value is, instrumental. They are slaves to persons and lack the capacity for legal rights. On the other side are persons. Their value is inherent and they have the capacity for an infinite number of rights. Persons are the masters of things.
Today all nonhuman animals are things, and all humans are persons. But “person” is not now, and never has been, synonymous with “human”. For centuries, vast numbers of humans—slaves, women, children—were legal things for some or all purposes. Much of the centuries’ civil rights struggles have been focused on breaking through that barrier, to move these humans from the darkness of “thinghood” into the light of personhood.
