Presentation title: Commodity, Irreplaceable Property, or Subject of Rights? The Multifarious Legal Status of Animals
Visa Kurki is a Finnish legal scholar and philosopher, working as Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Helsinki. He is also the Director of the Helsinki Animal Law Centre. In 2023, Kurki was awarded an ERC Starting Grant to investigate agency in law.
Kurki completed his PhD in 2017 at the Law Faculty of the University of Cambridge. His doctoral dissertation on legal personhood was awarded the Yorke Prize and the Salje Medal. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. The book was described as “an instant classic” in the Modern Law Review, and the journal Revus devoted a symposium to it in 2021. It has been translated into Spanish and a Korean translation is in the works.
Visa Kurki’s work on legal personhood has been cited in four US animal personhood trials, including two amicus curiae briefs by Harvard professor Laurence Tribe (links: [1] [2] [3]).
In addition to legal personhood, Kurki’s interests include animal law, rights theory, and social ontology.
Kurki is the Vice President of both the Finnish Legal Philosophy Society (Finnish IVR) and Finnish Society for Animal Rights Law. He has served as an editor of the Finnish law journal Oikeus and as the Editor-in-Chief of the Global Journal of Animal Law.