Persona Ficta: Frederick Douglass.

This essay resituates Frederick Douglass's turn to political abolitionism post-1851 within an Anglo-American discussion in legal hermeneutics about the concept of persona ficta : a legal fiction used to confer personhood on nonhuman entities, such as corporations. Douglass drew on this discussion, with roots in early modernity and a principal exponent in Thomas Hobbes, to adjudicate the unconstitutionality of slavery and the meaning of legal personhood. Rather than vouchsafe legal protections for the enslaved in a transcendent notion of humanity, Douglass sought justice in the idea that personhood is immanent to the artificial yet politically significant domain constituted by legal texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]