Peeters Law · Method under the magnifying glass
Laboratorium
Where the Observatory surveys fields of law from a distance, the Laboratorium works at close range. It takes a single legal question and examines the process by which facts are selected, framed and ultimately given legal form.
The starting point is deliberately modest. Before asking what the law says, it may be necessary to ask how the question came to be formulated in the first place. A matter presented as one of marriage, succession, liability or property already contains a choice of legal frame. That choice may be entirely justified. It may also conceal other ways of understanding the facts.
The Laboratorium slows that process down. It begins with the facts, identifies the practical interest at stake, considers the legal frameworks capable of bearing upon it, and only then asks which question the law is actually being called upon to answer. Each thought experiment begins with an apparently absurd question. Its improbability is precisely what makes it useful.
Working papers
The method at length · the argument developed in fullAlongside the specimens below, the Laboratorium also pursues longer studies. These working papers are separate investigations in their own right — not continuations of the specimens, and not connected to one another by subject matter. Each is worked through at the length it requires, yet each turns on the same concern: how a premature characterisation can distort the weighing of competing legal reasons.
The bench
Law from the facts · the question before the answer · what becomes visible at close rangeLegal problems seldom arrive without a prior description. By the time a matter is presented as a question of marriage, succession or liability, a significant analytical choice has usually already been made. Certain facts have been selected as legally relevant; others have receded from view. One institution or field of law has come to appear central, often before the process by which it acquired that position has been examined.
Legal reasoning therefore involves more than attaching a rule to a set of facts whose meaning is already settled. It requires a defensible movement between facts, legal materials, competing characterisations and the practical consequences of choosing one route rather than another. The method used here is intended to make that movement more visible.
It does not replace doctrine. Nor does it provide an alternative to close attention to legal sources. Its purpose is more elementary: to examine the analytical choices that precede the application of doctrine and that help determine which doctrine will become relevant. Close analysis may reveal that the apparent unity of a legal problem is not a feature of the facts themselves, but the consequence of the way in which those facts have been framed.
This single concern runs through everything gathered here. The studies differ entirely in subject — a question of marriage, a question of ownership, a question of good faith — and none is a sequel to another. What holds them together is one premise: that premature characterisation can settle a question before the competing reasons have been properly assessed, thereby narrowing the very process of assessment. The method is offered as a discipline against such narrowing, not as a substitute for legal judgment.
Premature Characterisation and the Construction of Legal Problems
An inquiry into how an apparently absurd legal question comes to be framed as a legal question. The purpose is not to defend an eccentric answer, but to examine the construction of the question to which the law is being asked to respond.
The first question is not: “Can I marry my dog?”
It is whether marriage was the right legal frame with which to begin.
The position
The formulation of the question may itself be premature
Questions concerning animals, AI systems and robots have each generated serious legal and philosophical discussion concerning recognition, status, autonomy, consciousness and legal personality. Those debates should not be treated as interchangeable. An animal may be sentient and subject to welfare legislation; an AI system may be software without embodiment; a robot may be embodied without being sentient. The legal basis for any claim about autonomy, legal personality, attachment or protection may therefore differ radically from one case to the next. Their juxtaposition is useful here for a narrower reason: in each field, legal analysis may begin from an institutional question whose framing has already selected part of the answer. Within that discussion the literature addresses consent, autonomy, consciousness, attachment, legal personality, status and recognition; other approaches examine the functions conventionally associated with marriage and ask whether those functions might be performed through different legal arrangements.
None of that work need be dismissed in order to raise a prior question.
The argument advanced here is not that the answers given are necessarily wrong. It is that the question to which they respond may already embody a series of analytical choices that have not themselves been examined.
A person who asks whether he or she may marry a dog has already selected marriage as the relevant legal institution. That selection directs attention towards particular matters: capacity, consent, status, legal personality and the conditions for entering into a legally recognised union.
The difficulty is that this is not yet a neutral beginning.
Marriage is already a characterisation of the problem.
Once that characterisation is accepted, the analysis proceeds within the conceptual boundaries of the chosen institution. The law is then asked whether the case can be accommodated within marriage, rather than whether marriage is the institution that best corresponds to the facts and interests from which the question arose.
The distinction matters because legal questions do not simply emerge, fully formed, from factual situations. They are constructed through selection. Some features are treated as relevant, others as peripheral; one legal vocabulary is preferred to another; a particular body of doctrine is brought into view.
The work of legal analysis begins before the doctrinal answer.
The scholarship and the legal developments
What they reveal, and what they do not yet determine
The existing discussion may be approached through several broad lines of inquiry.
One begins with normative foundations. It asks whether emotional attachment, consciousness, autonomy or some other characteristic can justify legal recognition.
Another proceeds functionally. It asks which incidents of marriage are actually sought and whether they can be reproduced, wholly or in part, through other legal institutions.
A third concentrates on legal personality and capacity. It asks whether the non-human entity possesses, or could be attributed, the legal status required to participate in the relationship under consideration.
Each approach illuminates part of the problem. The methodological difficulty lies in the possibility that all three begin after an earlier question has already been settled implicitly: why is this situation being analysed through the law of marriage at all?
Developments in positive law make the issue more complex.
Article 13 TFEU recognises animals as sentient beings. Within the Union policy fields specified in that provision, it requires the Union and the Member States to pay full regard to animal-welfare requirements, subject to the qualifications expressed in the Treaty itself. The provision is significant, but its significance should not be overstated. It is not a general private-law rule governing every legal relationship involving an animal.
National private law likewise resists simple binary description. French law recognises animals as living beings endowed with sentience, while continuing, subject to protective legislation, to apply the legal regime of property to them. Spanish law also recognises animals as living sentient beings and qualifies the application of the law of goods and things by reference to compatibility with their nature and with the rules intended for their protection.
These developments do not eliminate legal classification. They make its structure more interesting. An animal may be recognised as sentient without thereby becoming a legal person; aspects of property law may continue to apply without exhausting the legal significance of the animal's status.
Scientific developments occupy a related, but distinct, plane. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness expressed a scientific position concerning the neurological substrates of conscious states in non-human animals. Such work may inform legal debate, but it does not determine its own legal consequences. The transition from an empirical proposition to a legal category remains a normative and institutional step.
The same distinction is necessary in relation to human-rights law. Article 8 ECHR protects the private and family life of the human rights-holder, together with home and correspondence. A relationship between a human being and an animal may, depending on the circumstances and the legal issue raised, be relevant to interests protected on the human side of that relationship. Article 8 does not, however, make the animal itself a Convention rights-holder.
The legal landscape is therefore neither static nor conceptually uniform. Yet none of these developments establishes that the appropriate starting point is the question whether a person may marry an animal.
That question must still justify its own frame.
The methodological core
Why the question itself may be the problem
Consider the proposition:
Can I marry my dog?
The word marry performs a considerable amount of analytical work.
It selects an institution. With that institution come familiar questions concerning capacity, consent, personal status, formal validity and legal personality. The analysis is channelled accordingly.
At the same time, other questions may disappear from view.
What, in practical terms, is being sought? Is the concern the continued care of the animal after the death of its human companion? Is it the provision of financial resources for that care? Is the object to prevent separation? Is recognition of an emotional bond being sought? Is the interest primarily symbolic? Is a particular patrimonial consequence desired? Is the question really about control, responsibility, continuity of care, inheritance, public recognition or something else altogether?
Those are not variants of a single legal question. They may engage quite different legal fields and instruments.
Depending on the jurisdiction and the interest concerned, the relevant analysis might involve succession law, contract, property, trusts or foundations where available, protective regulation, estate planning, constitutional principles or the law of legal personality.
The point is not that one of these routes must provide the desired outcome.
The point is that the choice between them should precede, rather than follow, the assumption that the matter is fundamentally one of marriage.
Legal characterisation may begin the inquiry provisionally. It should not be allowed to determine, unnoticed, the field within which the inquiry must end.
The analytical sequence
From an apparent question to the question that requires an answer
The method does not begin by proposing a different answer. It begins by examining the sequence through which the legal question is constructed.
Before accepting Can I marry my dog? as the question to be answered, the inquiry passes through five dimensions and two higher-order inquiries.
Together they do not determine the answer mechanically. Their function is diagnostic. They expose assumptions, competing frameworks and points of tension that may otherwise remain concealed by the initial formulation of the problem.
Ω · Stone and Douglas
When the boundary between legal subject and legal object itself becomes a question
In 1972, Christopher D. Stone published Should Trees Have Standing? Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects.
Stone's intervention was important not simply because he asked whether natural objects might hold legal rights. Its deeper significance lay in making visible the legal construction of a boundary that was commonly treated as natural: the distinction between those entities capable of appearing within law as holders of legal interests and those capable only of appearing as objects of the interests of others.
In his dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton, Justice William O. Douglas expressly referred to Stone's work and proposed a different conceptual view of the litigation. Rather than treating the threatened environment merely as the object of concern of an organisation, he contemplated the case from the perspective of the natural object itself. On that analysis, he suggested, the case might more appropriately have been understood as Mineral King v. Morton.
The relationship between those arguments and the method used here is methodological rather than genealogical.
Stone and Douglas did not formulate the present method, nor are they presented as its precursors. Their relevance lies in the operation they perform: each re-examines a legal boundary that had become so familiar that its constructed character was liable to disappear from view.
The present inquiry asks a different prior question. Before asking whether a dog, a natural object, an AI system or a robot should be recognised as a legal subject, it asks why the concrete problem has been constructed as a question of legal subjectivity in the first place. Before asking whether a relationship should be recognised as marriage, it asks what interest caused the question to be formulated through marriage.
Stone made a legally improbable question available for serious analysis. Douglas showed how a change in the identification of the legal actor could alter the conceptual structure of a case. The present inquiry asks an earlier question: how was this particular legal question constructed, and what disappeared from view in that process?
What would show that the method adds nothing
The condition under which the framework fails
The inquiry does not establish that these questions could not be identified through careful conventional legal analysis, functional reasoning or attentive examination of the client's actual objective. Nor is the multiplication of analytical perspectives valuable in itself. The framework adds something only if it reveals legally consequential choices that would otherwise remain implicit, or makes those choices more systematic and open to scrutiny. If ordinary legal analysis exposes the same choices with equal clarity, discipline and economy, the framework has added little.
The conclusion — the position, once more
The literature concerning animals, AI systems and robots as possible objects of relational or status-based recognition raises genuine questions of law and legal theory.
The developments in positive law are equally significant. Article 13 TFEU gives legal recognition to animal sentience within its Treaty context. National private-law systems have begun to distinguish more carefully between animal sentience and the continued application of aspects of property law. Scientific work concerning consciousness has altered the factual background against which legal debate takes place. The older debate about the limits of legal subjectivity, from Stone's article to Douglas's dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton, remains part of the intellectual landscape.
None of this requires the question Can I marry my dog? to be accepted as the proper starting point.
The difficulty is not that the answer must necessarily be negative. It is that the question already contains an analytical choice.
Legal characterisation is not a neutral starting point. It is a provisional analytical construction that must remain open to revision as the relevant facts, interests, legal orders and normative reasons become clearer.
The question whether one can or may marry a dog, an AI partner or a robot may be premature, not because the answer is necessarily negative, but because the formulation of the question already assumes the legal framework through which the situation is to be understood.
Existing scholarship may provide sound answers to the questions it addresses. The methodological concern is that an answer can be doctrinally correct while responding to a question that was framed too early.
The five dimensions, followed by the fault-line and reflexive inquiries, are intended to expose that possibility. They ask which legal order is concerned, what practical interest is at stake, which principles are genuinely engaged, how language and legal culture have shaped the question, and which legal route corresponds to the objective pursued. They then ask where positive law itself reveals unresolved or overlapping classifications, and whether the categories used in the analysis have been treated as self-evident when they are themselves legal constructions.
The purpose is not to guarantee a different answer. It is to make clear why a particular question is the one that ought to be answered.
Legal reasoning remains a craft precisely because the question to which doctrine is applied is itself the product of legal judgment.
The value of the analysis lies, if anywhere, in making those choices visible: which legal order is engaged, what practical interest is at stake, which principles are genuinely implicated, which vocabulary has framed the inquiry, and which route is capable of serving the objective pursued. The framework should therefore be judged not by whether it produces an unusual answer, but by whether it makes legally consequential choices more explicit, revisable and open to scrutiny.
The fuller scholarly treatment, including the relationship of this method to Popper, Kuhn, Crombag, Savigny, Mayer and Heyvaert, is developed in the working paper Before Qualification: The Construction of the Legal Question (Karen-Anne Peeters, June 2026).
The question is therefore not yet: How can I marry my dog? Nor even: May I marry my dog? The prior question is: which question are you actually asking?
Premature Reification and the Boundary of the Ownable
A second inquiry into how an apparently absurd legal question comes to be framed as a legal question. As with the first specimen, the purpose is not to defend an eccentric answer, but to examine the construction of the question to which the law is being asked to respond.
The first question is not: “Can I own the moon?”
It is whether ownership was the right legal frame with which to begin.
The position
The formulation of the question may itself be premature
Questions concerning the appropriation of the sea, the airspace, the deep seabed, the polar regions and outer space have each generated serious legal discussion concerning sovereignty, common resources, exclusive use and the limits of private title. Those debates should not be treated as interchangeable. The high seas, the deep seabed beyond national jurisdiction, the Area, Antarctica and the surface of a celestial body are governed by distinct instruments and rest on distinct assumptions. Their juxtaposition is useful here for a narrower reason: in each field, legal analysis may begin from an institutional question — the question of ownership — whose framing has already selected part of the answer.
None of that work need be dismissed in order to raise a prior question.
The argument advanced here is not that the answers given are necessarily wrong. It is that the question to which they respond may already embody a series of analytical choices that have not themselves been examined.
A person who asks whether he or she may own the moon has already selected ownership as the relevant legal institution. That selection directs attention towards particular matters: title, possession, registration, transfer, exclusion and the conditions under which a thing becomes the subject of private property.
The difficulty is that this is not yet a neutral beginning.
Ownership is already a characterisation of the problem.
Once that characterisation is accepted, the analysis proceeds within the conceptual boundaries of the chosen institution. The law is then asked whether the celestial body can be accommodated within the category of ownable things, rather than whether ownership is the institution that best corresponds to the facts and interests from which the question arose.
The distinction matters because a thing is not ownable as a matter of physical fact. Ownability is a legal attribute conferred on some objects and withheld from others. Air, running water, the open sea and, on the prevailing view, the surface of a celestial body have long been treated as incapable of private appropriation, not because they cannot be described, but because the law has declined to make them the subject of exclusive title.
The work of legal analysis begins before the doctrinal answer.
The scholarship and the legal developments
What they reveal, and what they do not yet determine
The existing discussion may be approached through several broad lines of inquiry.
One begins with sovereignty. It asks whether a territory or object is capable of being brought under the authority of a State at all, and treats private title as something that ordinarily presupposes such authority.
Another proceeds functionally. It asks which incidents of ownership are actually sought — use, extraction, exclusion, commercial exploitation, recognition — and whether they can be secured, wholly or in part, without full title.
A third concentrates on the classification of the thing itself. It asks whether the object belongs to a category open to appropriation, or to one of the categories the law has historically placed beyond private property.
Each approach illuminates part of the problem. The methodological difficulty lies in the possibility that all three begin after an earlier question has already been settled implicitly: why is this situation being analysed through the law of ownership at all?
Developments in positive law make the issue more complex.
Article II of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 provides that outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means. The provision is directed at States, and its central object is sovereignty rather than the private-law concept of ownership. Article VI of the same Treaty renders States internationally responsible for national activities in outer space, including those of non-governmental entities, which require authorisation and continuing supervision. Private activity is therefore not unregulated; it is channelled through the responsibility of a State.
The Moon Agreement of 1979 goes further, declaring the Moon and its natural resources to be the common heritage of mankind and providing for an international regime to govern their exploitation. Its practical significance is limited by the small number of ratifications and the absence of the principal space-faring States.
National law has since introduced a further distinction. The United States, by the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act of 2015, provided that a citizen engaged in the commercial recovery of a space resource is entitled to possess, own, transport, use and sell that resource, while expressly disclaiming any assertion of sovereignty or of ownership over any celestial body. Luxembourg adopted comparable legislation in 2017, and other States have followed. The Artemis Accords, concluded from 2020, affirm that the extraction of space resources may be carried out consistently with the Outer Space Treaty.
These developments do not eliminate legal classification. They make its structure more interesting. A celestial body may remain incapable of national appropriation while resources extracted from it become capable of private ownership; the prohibition may bind the sovereign without exhausting the position of the private actor whose activity the sovereign authorises.
Older categories reappear beneath these modern instruments. Roman law already distinguished the res communis omnium, things common to all and incapable of appropriation, from the res nullius, things belonging to no one and open to acquisition by the first taker. Whether a celestial body is closer to the one or the other is not a fact about the moon; it is a legal decision about the moon.
The legal landscape is therefore neither static nor conceptually uniform. Yet none of these developments establishes that the appropriate starting point is the question whether a person may own the moon.
That question must still justify its own frame.
The methodological core
Why the question itself may be the problem
Consider the proposition:
Can I own the moon?
The word own performs a considerable amount of analytical work.
It selects an institution. With that institution come familiar questions concerning title, possession, transfer, registration and the right to exclude. The analysis is channelled accordingly.
At the same time, other questions may disappear from view.
What, in practical terms, is being sought? Is the concern the right to extract and sell a mineral resource? Is it the security of a long-term operation on a particular site? Is the object to exclude competitors from an area of activity? Is recognition of a discovery being sought? Is the interest primarily commercial, scientific, or symbolic? Is the question really about title, or about use, priority, authorisation, liability, or continuity of an enterprise?
Those are not variants of a single legal question. They may engage quite different legal fields and instruments.
Depending on the interest concerned, the relevant analysis might involve public international law, the domestic space legislation of the authorising State, licensing and regulatory regimes, contract, the law governing resource rights, liability and insurance, or the protection of a commercial operation rather than title to land.
The point is not that one of these routes must provide the desired outcome.
The point is that the choice between them should precede, rather than follow, the assumption that the matter is fundamentally one of ownership.
Legal characterisation may begin the inquiry provisionally. It should not be allowed to determine, unnoticed, the field within which the inquiry must end.
The analytical sequence
From an apparent question to the question that requires an answer
The method does not begin by proposing a different answer. It begins by examining the sequence through which the legal question is constructed.
Before accepting Can I own the moon? as the question to be answered, the inquiry passes through five dimensions and two higher-order inquiries.
Together they do not determine the answer mechanically. Their function is diagnostic. They expose assumptions, competing frameworks and points of tension that may otherwise remain concealed by the initial formulation of the problem.
Ω · Grotius and Selden
When the boundary between the ownable and the common itself becomes a question
In 1609 Hugo Grotius published Mare Liberum, arguing that the sea, by its nature, could not be reduced to the property or sovereignty of any nation and must remain open to the use of all.
Grotius's intervention was important not simply because he defended freedom of navigation. Its deeper significance lay in making visible the legal construction of a boundary that was commonly treated as natural: the distinction between those things capable of becoming the object of exclusive title and those things the law places beyond appropriation.
In 1635 John Selden replied in Mare Clausum, contending that the sea was capable of appropriation and that a sovereign might lawfully exercise dominion over defined maritime spaces. The disagreement was not principally about the facts of the sea. It was about whether the sea belonged to the category of things that may be owned, and by whom that categorisation was to be decided.
The relationship between that debate and the method used here is methodological rather than genealogical.
Grotius and Selden did not formulate the present method, nor are they presented as its precursors. Their relevance lies in the operation they perform: each re-examines a boundary — the line between the ownable and the common — that had become so familiar that its constructed character was liable to disappear from view.
The present inquiry asks a different prior question. Before asking whether the moon, the seabed or any other space beyond national territory should be recognised as ownable, it asks why the concrete problem has been constructed as a question of ownership in the first place. Before asking whether an interest should be recognised as title, it asks what interest caused the question to be formulated through title.
Grotius made the ownability of the sea available for serious analysis. Selden showed how a change in the classification of the object could alter the legal structure of the dispute. The present inquiry asks an earlier question: how was this particular legal question constructed, and what disappeared from view in that process?
What would show that the method adds nothing
The condition under which the framework fails
The inquiry does not establish that these questions could not be identified through careful conventional legal analysis, functional reasoning or attentive examination of the client's actual objective. Nor is the multiplication of analytical perspectives valuable in itself. The framework adds something only if it reveals legally consequential choices that would otherwise remain implicit, or makes those choices more systematic and open to scrutiny. If ordinary legal analysis exposes the same choices with equal clarity, discipline and economy, the framework has added little.
The conclusion — the position, once more
The literature concerning the appropriation of outer space, the deep seabed and other spaces beyond national territory raises genuine questions of law and legal theory.
The developments in positive law are equally significant. The Outer Space Treaty forecloses national appropriation of celestial bodies while making States responsible for the private activity they authorise. The Moon Agreement advances the common-heritage principle, though with limited acceptance. National legislation has begun to distinguish carefully between the celestial body, which cannot be owned, and the resource extracted, which may be. The older debate about the limits of appropriation, from Grotius's Mare Liberum to Selden's Mare Clausum, remains part of the intellectual landscape.
None of this requires the question Can I own the moon? to be accepted as the proper starting point.
The difficulty is not that the answer must necessarily be negative. It is that the question already contains an analytical choice.
Legal characterisation is not a neutral starting point. It is a provisional analytical construction that must remain open to revision as the relevant facts, interests, legal orders and normative reasons become clearer.
The question whether one can or may own the moon, the seabed or any space beyond national territory may be premature, not because the answer is necessarily negative, but because the formulation of the question already assumes the legal framework through which the situation is to be understood.
Existing scholarship may provide sound answers to the questions it addresses. The methodological concern is that an answer can be doctrinally correct while responding to a question that was framed too early.
The five dimensions, followed by the fault-line and reflexive inquiries, are intended to expose that possibility. They ask which legal order is concerned, what practical interest is at stake, which principles are genuinely engaged, how language and legal culture have shaped the question, and which legal route corresponds to the objective pursued. They then ask where positive law itself reveals unresolved or overlapping classifications, and whether the categories used in the analysis — here, the category of the ownable — have been treated as self-evident when they are themselves legal constructions.
The purpose is not to guarantee a different answer. It is to make clear why a particular question is the one that ought to be answered.
The value of the analysis lies, if anywhere, in making those choices visible: which legal order is engaged, what practical interest is at stake, which principles are genuinely implicated, which vocabulary has framed the inquiry, and which route is capable of serving the objective pursued. The framework should therefore be judged not by whether it produces an unusual answer, but by whether it makes legally consequential choices more explicit, revisable and open to scrutiny.
The fuller scholarly treatment, including the relationship of this method to Popper, Kuhn, Crombag, Savigny, Mayer and Heyvaert, is developed in the working paper Before Qualification: The Construction of the Legal Question (Karen-Anne Peeters, June 2026).
The question is therefore not yet: How can I own the moon? Nor even: May I own the moon? The prior question is: which question are you actually asking?