Reconsidering Legal Personhood in Indonesian Private Law: Bundles of Legal Incidents, Attribution, and Governance Failure

Abstract

Legal personhood in contemporary private law has undergone a profound conceptual shift in response to the challenges posed by natural and artificial intelligence. Rather than positioning legal personhood as an ontological category, this article considers it as a functional institutional instrument for allocating rights, obligations, powers, responsibilities and immunities. Legal personhood is the starting point for a series of Hohfeldian legal incidents in private law relations, which are then viewed as possessing legal capacity, enforceability, liability and remedies. The article integrates Hohfeldian analysis with systematic comparative assessment. It also focuses on a doctrinal legal research method with a conceptual and analytical-jurisprudential orientation. The Atrato and Whanganui River models are the subjects of study, examining issues of effective representation, enforceability, effective remedies and granting of liability. When the models are linked to artificial intelligence, the authors offer three options: no legal personhood, limited legal personhood and full legal personhood. Although the analysis focuses on Indonesian private law, the authors also include cross-border dogmatic and regulatory developments, particularly those occurring in Malaysia and the ASEAN region. This article asserts that the recognition of nature as a legal entity can be effective only if it is based on enforceable obligations, concrete representations, and legal remedies. Recognition of legal personhood for artificial intelligence can only be normatively justified if it strengthens attribution and legal remedies, without excluding human actors and organisations that develop, implement, manage, or benefit from AI systems from responsibility. Therefore, rigorous institutional justification is a prerequisite for expanding legal entity status under Indonesian private law to prevent governance failure. This expansion should not be limited to symbolic designation or exemption from liability.