The project focusses on current shifts in the legal order of our relationships to "things" (res). If we take private property as the ideal starting point – following the early sociologies of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies or Max Weber, for example – then the distinction between the legal subject (persona) and the legal object (res), from which individual claims against others (legal relationship) arise, becomes apparent.
Shifts can currently be observed in all three points – particularly in view of technical developments and advancing digitalisation, but also increasing scarcity of resources: New forms of ownership (e.g. intellectual property rights or cultural property rights) are changing the definition of what can be made into a "thing" in and through the law and can therefore be regarded as an (economic) object of access (e.g. genetic data, ideas, body fragments, seeds); at the same time, non-human entities are increasingly being recognised as legal subjects and this is becoming the point of reference for debate. At the same time, non-human entities are increasingly being recognised as legal subjects or are becoming the point of reference in debates (e.g. "nature" or natural objects such as rivers or glaciers; animals; robots); finally, there is increasing controversy about the possibility of ownership or its concrete form and the associated question of availability (e.g. the commons, commons or open source).
Despite the increasing relevance of the underlying problems (nature conservation, animal welfare, protection of privacy from state and economic surveillance, but also the struggle for indigenous or community rights, anti-capitalism movements etc.), a genuinely sociological analysis of the legal shifts, but also of the individual phenomena, is rarely found. This is where the project comes in. A legal reorganisation of things, a change in the "government of things" (Foucault, Lemke), leads – according to the thesis – to a change in the government of people via the connection between person, thing and legal relationship. At the same time, it is open to debate whether a new conceptualisation of res and persona in its concepts of the actor, action or attribution will also pose challenges to sociological theory.
