Regarding the Issue of the Essence of Legal Treatment and the Possibility of Granting Legal Status to a Robot in Civil Law

Abstract

Active development of digital economy in Russia and across the world stimulates the usage of the robotic devices in many different areas of society. Thus arises the necessity to study the issue of the legal treatment of robots and how it corresponds to the legal status if the subjects of civil law. In this paper the possibility of granting robots the status of the subjects of the law is researched. As the robots are essentially technical devises it makes sense to view them as objects of law with specific technical specifications. Next some possibilities of robots making specific actions and thus having some characteristics of the subject of law are studied. We found out that robots (with AI or some parts of it) do possess such characteristics. However it should be noted, that despite having some characteristics of the subject of civil circulation, robots cannot be the subjects of the law as they don’t possess their own free will and thus cannot express their mental attitude towards their actions. There’s no real basis to make robots a part of civil circulation as independent and standalone subject of the law, based on the case with the legal persons. The purpose of legal persons for existing is always clear and justified by the necessity of capital aggregation or by the joint venture of physical persons. Also the legal persons take part in civil circulation via its official bodies, which may be represented by a physical person or several of them who possess their own free will and intelligence. Robots with their abilities to independently carry out some physical acts without human interference may perform specific functions as a part of the system of property relations. But despite that fact robots cannot be recognized as independent subjects of law, as their actions are always defined by their human owners who actually possess legal capacity, active capacity and delictual dispositive capacity. The methods of general scientific research (dialectic, inductive, deductive, analytic, synthetic) and specific scientific research (legalistic, interpretative) are used in this research.