There is a powerful fundamental right hiding in plain sight: the fundamental right to free movement. This right goes beyond the consistently acknowledged—though infrequently applied—fundamental right to interstate travel. The true scope of the Constitution’s protection of movement through substantive due process safeguards local, interstate, and international travel. Though overlooked today, the fundamental right to free movement has deep roots in history and tradition, and in the decisions of numerous state and federal courts, including the Supreme Court.

This Article is the first to examine freedom of movement using the history and tradition test for unenumerated fundamental rights. This Article begins by tracing the right to free movement from the Magna Carta, through Blackstone’s Commentaries, colonial America, early state constitutions, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. As this analysis shows, repressive governments have routinely sought to limit movement across and within boundaries. But the English and U.S. legal traditions are marked by repeated affirmations of the right—there is strong and persistent historical support for a fundamental right to free movement.

This Article then turns to judicial discussions of movement rights, both historical and contemporary. Drawing on several previously unconnected lines of decision, this examination surfaces a vibrant picture of the fundamental right to free movement recognized by the courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court.

Given its firm foundation and expansive reach, this is a right that should be applied regularly—to anti-gender-affirming-care or anti-abortion laws targeting travel, to quarantine restrictions locking down a community, and to any of the wide variety of other restrictions limiting free movement.

Between the mid-twentieth century and modern day, the animal-agriculture model has shifted from small farms to industrial operations. During that evolution, the negative externalities of animal-farming practices have intensified. One of those externalities—animal waste—has become particularly problematic. Because of the sheer number of animals raised in the United States for slaughter and dairy production, the magnitude of animal waste produced is overwhelming. To deal with this problem, animal farmers often liquefy the animal waste and then spray it onto open fields. In that spraying process, liquefied animal waste carries through the air and reaches nearby homes, coating those properties with manure and odor.

Historically, this spraying was unnecessary: farmers did not have such large operations creating such immense waste. However, as these operations grew, so did the need to find alternative solutions. Alongside those solutions came protections for the externalities they created: all fifty states largely prohibit nuisance suits against animal-agriculture operations. This has left communities without a method to legally protect themselves from the spraying nuisance. Further, the members of these communities are often unable or unwilling to leave their homes, many of which have been in their families for generations, long predating the spraying operations.

These communities deserve an alternative method by which they can obtain justice and compensation for bearing the negative externalities of American meat and dairy production. One such option is the Takings Clause. To engage in this manure spraying, many farmers must obtain a permit under the Clean Water Act. This Note argues that a permit granting farmers the right to spray manure should be considered a government authorization to occupy their neighbors’ properties and significantly lower the value of their homes. In receiving just compensation for these regulatory takings, affected communities will not only find some financial justice, but also hold the government and farms accountable for the negative externalities that they impose on marginalized people.

When artificial intelligence (AI) acquires self-awareness, agency, and unique intelligence, it will attain ontological personhood. Management of firms by AI would be technologically and economically feasible. The law could confer upon AI the status of legal personhood, as it did upon traditional business firms in the past, thus dispensing with the need for inserting AI as property within the legal boundary of a firm. As a separate and distinct entity, AI could function independently as a manager in the way that legal or natural persons do today: i.e., AI as director, officer, partner, member, or manager. Such a future is desirable only if AI as manager creates more value than AI as tool or android serf. The principle of legal personhood is not intrinsically incompatible with the idea of machine person. This Article explores the legal, policy, and economic questions: Could we confer legal personhood on AI? Should we?

This Article answers that the idea of AI as manager, qua legal person, is compelling. Economic and legal theories suggest that the conferral of AI personhood, permitting AI as manager, would create more value. With respect to law and policy, current laws of business firms suffice to provide the essential framework for the future. They mandate that corporate managers must be natural persons, but permit managers of noncorporate firms to be legal persons. This dichotomy provides the appropriate conceptual compromise. The use of AI as manager should be limited to private and noncorporate firms. This compromise, coupled with the limiting conditions identified in this Article, reflects the balances of cost and benefit as well as risk and value. Corporations have always been more consequential enterprises, and permitting AI to serve as corporate officers or directors could impose greater social and economic externalities. Legal personhood of AI would usher in a brave new world, which should be welcomed in the spirit of innovation—but the law should ensure a stable old world.