PUBLISHED:February 15, 2010

Call for papers for 6th Annual Colloquium on the Law of Futuristic Persons

The colloquium is an exchange of scholarly views regarding the legal status of people in an revived from cryonic or cybernetic byostasis. This year's colloquium theme is "The Human Rights of People in Biostasis."

"Cryonic Biostasis" means the virtual halting of metabolic processes by being preserved at very low temperature upon determination of legal death but prior to irreversible death. "Cybernetic biostasis" means the archiving of a person's memory, personality, and other cognitive characteristics in cyberspace such that future mindware could restore the consciousness of the archived person.

The colloquium has two tracks available to any person enrolled in an accredited law school during 2010:

Track 1: Interested participants must submit, no later than September 10, 2010, a 6,000-10,000 word (including footnotes) analysis of the legal rights and obligations of futuristic persons, defined as a being who claims to have the rights and obligations associated with humans, but is beyond currently accepted notions of legal personhood. (Examples would include a computer claiming to be conscious; a person successfully revived from post-mortem cryonic biostasis; or a person's downloaded cyberconsciousness in a bionano body.)

Track 2: Interested participants must submit, no later than September 10, 2010, a 4,000-6,000 word (including footnotes) appellate brief in support or in opposition to the granting of U.S. citizenship to a futuristic person, as defined above. For background, view the 2003 California case, the 2005 Florida case or the 2006 Alabama case.

The chosen participants will be notified by October 10, 2010, and are expected to orally present a summary of their paper or brief during the colloquium on December 10, 2010. Selected papers and briefs will be published in the colloquium's online archive. Selected participants will receive a $1,000 honorarium.

For submissions and further information:

Terasem Movement Inc.
P.O. Box 372869
Satellite Beach, FL 32937
321-676-3690, ext. 100
fax: 321-676-3691
e-mail: Lori@TerasemCentral.org