The 2024 Prize for the Humanities, awarded by the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, goes to Associate Professor Visa Kurki. The prize, worth €15,000, is awarded annually to a researcher in the field of humanities who has already achieved international recognition in the early stages of their career.
Visa Kurki is an Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Helsinki’s Faculty of Law. His research has long focused on various legal persons and is in the field of legal theory and legal philosophy.
“I wrote my Bachelor’s thesis on the Finnish Animal Welfare Act, and I became interested in the question of whether an animal can be a legal person, i.e. whether an animal can have rights in the eyes of the law. I wrote my Master’s thesis on this topic and thus became interested in the concept of legal personhood more broadly,” Kurki says.
Kurki graduated with a Master of Laws degree from the University of Helsinki in 2012. He then relocated to the University of Cambridge in the UK, where he completed his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 2017. His doctoral thesis, A Theory of Legal Personality, was awarded the Yorke Prize and the Salje Medal at the University of Cambridge.
Kurki’s publications have received wide international attention, and his research has been cited in several animal rights trials in the United States. In addition to his own research, Kurki also serves as the director of the Helsinki Animal Law Centre where research concerning animal law is conducted.
“The treatment of animals and its connection to the sustainability crisis is one of the biggest questions of our time, but it’s also an area of scientific interest because it’s still so under-researched. I can thus create something truly new,” concludes Kurki.
In addition to animals, Kurki has analysed and developed the concept and content of legal personhood in relation to children, legally incompetent people and artificial intelligence, among others. Currently, Kurki is leading the ERC Starting Grant project Agency in Law, funded by the European Research Council for €1.5 million.
The project, led by Kurki, examines how the idea of agency has changed over the past decades and how new agents should be perceived. For example, children have not traditionally been considered agents who can make decisions for themselves in the eyes of the law. The concept of agency is changing, however – International agreements require children and, for example, people with disabilities to be treated as agents. Research can help both courts and legislators to better understand the changing nature of agency.
Kurki is a member of Young Academy Finland for the 2022–2026 term. He is actively involved in the Finnish Animal Rights Law Society and the Finnish Regional Section of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, among others. Kurki has also served as editor and editor-in-chief of several scientific publications.
Every year, many aspiring law students are introduced to the basics of the discipline through Kurki’s book Haluatko juristiksi? [Do You Want to Be a Lawyer?] (Kauppakamari, 2014).