Richard Roe: A Memoir of a Legal Person

by Tyler Coburn (Author)See all formats and editions

The fictional memoir of a legal person--potentially everyone and actually no one.

Richard Roe is the fictional memoir of a legal person. The name is one of the oldest used in English law when the real name of someone is withheld, or when a corpse can't be identified. Richard Roe is a known unknown, a one-size-fits-all, potentially everyone and actually no one. This memoir gives voice to the legal fictions that creep around the margins of selfhood, and draws on concepts of personhood from legal, psychological, linguistic, and metaphysical realms, including arguments from the last two centuries for the legal personhood of corporations, rivers, and other elements of the natural world.