The “reasonable man,” along with his female counterpart, are familiar figures in legal doctrine, making appearances in a broad range of civil and criminal cases, and generating lively academic debate. But this seminar asks a more fundamental question - what is it that makes a person a legal person in the first place? This question, in turn, prompts a more basic one: what assumptions about human nature go into the making of the legal subject? To answer these deceptively simple questions, we will examine cases and commentaries through historical time, and across doctrinal fields. This inquiry will be necessarily interdisciplinary in nature, because lawyers themselves have drawn on a range of nonlegal texts - religious, philosophical, literary, and scientific — in their constructions of the legal person. The focus will be primarily on American legal culture, from 1800 to the present, and the doctrinal areas that will receive the greatest attention are contracts, wills, torts, and criminal law.