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I am a Finnish legal scholar and philosopher, working as Associate Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Helsinki.

I completed my PhD in 2017 at the Law Faculty of the University of Cambridge. My doctoral dissertation on legal personhood was awarded the Yorke Prize and the Salje Medal. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2019, and made Open Access in 2020. The book was described as “an instant classic” in the Modern Law Review, and the journal Revus devoted a symposium to it in 2021.

My work on legal personhood has been cited in four US animal personhood trials, including two amicus curiae briefs by Harvard professor Laurence Tribe (links: [1] [2] [3]).

In addition to legal personhood, my interests include animal law, rights theory and social ontology.

I am currently supervising a number of PhD students, but I am willing to consider further students in relevant fields. Please feel free to contact me if you are interested: visa.kurki@helsinki.fi.

I am Vice President of both the Finnish Legal Philosophy Society (Finnish IVR) and Finnish Society for Animal Rights Law. I’m one of the two editors of the Finnish law journal Oikeus. I have served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Global Journal of Animal Law.

Apart from my academic occupations, I sing (as a member of Lain Huuto); enjoy the Third Golden Age of Television; and play computer games (mostly grand strategies and RPGs).

My name is pronounced more or less like a Spanish name, though with an English “v”: VEE-sah KOOR-kee.