Legal-Personhood
Asymmetric reach-through
The mechanism by which the legal characterization of conduct attaches legal burdens — duty, liability, punishability — to a living person without first converting that person's status into anything, and without conferring the correlative benefits — right, power, immunity. Names why status-reversal remedies miss: liability reaches the living being through what they did, not through what they are. United States v. Amy is the limit case; ordinary regulatory reach is its diluted descendant.
The movement claim that the 'toga civilis' passage in United States v. Amy, 24 F. Cas. 792 (1859), establishes a bar on Congressional power to create civil/legal personhood is unsupported — the passage is losing counsel's argument, not Taney's holding
Byron Beers's Treatise #3 cites United States v. Amy, 24 F. Cas. 792 (1859), for the proposition that 'the creation of a civil or legal person out of a thing, the investure of a chattel with the toga civilis, may be an achievement of imperial power, but it is beyond the compass of an American congress.' Beers reads it as Chief Justice Taney establishing a general doctrine that Congress cannot create civil/legal personhood — supporting the corpus's claim that the natural man can decline civil personhood and exit the regime that addresses persons. The citation fails twice over. First, the passage is not Taney's holding at all: it is the argument of defense counsel John Howard, made on behalf of the slaveowner that the federal statute could not reach the slave — the very argument Taney rejected. Beers quotes the losing side as if it were the court. Second, the case's actual holding refutes the inference Beers draws from it. Taney upheld Amy's conviction through the slave's 'twofold character': as a person, the slave 'is bound to obey the law, and may, like any other person, be punished if he offends against it.' The reachability of the living being was never contingent on civil-person status. The case is the paradigm refutation of 'decline personhood, become unreachable,' and the antebellum slave-law order it belonged to was repudiated by the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.