Legal person
In law, a legal person is any person or legal entity that can do the things a human person is usually able to do in law – such as enter into contracts, sue and be sued, own property, and so on. The reason for the term "legal person" is that some legal persons are not human persons: companies and corporations are persons, legally speaking, but they are not, in a literal sense, human beings.
Legal personhood is a prerequisite to legal capacity : it is a prerequisite for an international organization being able to sign international treaties in its own name.
History
The concept of legal personhood for organizations of people is at least as old as Ancient Rome: a variety of collegial institutions enjoyed the benefit under Roman law.The doctrine has been attributed to Pope Innocent IV, who seems at least to have helped spread the idea of persona ficta as it is called in Latin. In canon law, the doctrine of persona ficta allowed monasteries to have a legal existence that was apart from the monks, simplifying the difficulty in balancing the need for such groups to have infrastructure though the monks took vows of personal poverty. Another effect of this was that, as a fictional person, a monastery could not be held guilty of delict due to not having a soul, helping to protect the organization from non-contractual obligations to surrounding communities. This effectively moved such liability to persons acting within the organization while protecting the structure itself, since persons were considered to have a soul and therefore capable of negligence and able to be excommunicated.
In the common law tradition, only a person could possess legal rights. To allow them to function, the legal personality of a corporation was established to include five legal rights—the right to a common treasury or chest, the right to a corporate seal, the right to sue and be sued, the right to hire agents and the right to make by-laws.
Since the 19th century, legal personhood has been further construed to make it a citizen, resident, or domiciliary of a state. In Louisville, C. & C.R. Co. v. Letson, 2 How. 497, 558, 11 L.Ed. 353, the U.S. Supreme Court held that for the purposes of the case at hand, a corporation is "capable of being treated as a citizen of , as much as a natural person." Ten years later, they reaffirmed the result of Letson, though on the somewhat different theory that "those who use the corporate name, and exercise the faculties conferred by it," should be presumed conclusively to be citizens of the corporation's State of incorporation. Marshall v. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co., 16 How. 314, 329, 14 L.Ed. 953. These concepts have been codified by statute, as U.S. jurisdictional statutes specifically address the domicile of corporations.
Forms
There are two kinds of legal persons: human and non-human. In law, a human person is called a natural person, and a non-human person is called a juridical person.Juridical persons are entities such as corporations, firms, and many government agencies. For most purposes they are treated in law as if they were human persons.
While natural persons acquire legal personality simply by being born, juridical persons must have legal personality conferred on them by a legal process and, for this reason, they are sometimes called "artificial" persons. In the most common case, legal personality is usually acquired by registration with a government agency set up for the purpose. In other cases, legal personhood may result from legislation, such as the manner in which the Charity Commission was created in the UK.
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 16 advocates for the provision of legal identity for all natural persons, including birth registration by 2030 as part of the 2030 Agenda.
Juridical persons
Artificial personality, juridical personality, or juristic personality is the characteristic of a non-living entity regarded by law as having the status of personhood.A juridical or artificial person has a legal name and has certain rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and liabilities in law, similar to those of a natural person. The concept of a juridical person is a fundamental legal fiction. It is pertinent to the philosophy of law, as it is essential to laws affecting a corporation.
Juridical personhood allows one or more natural persons to act as a single entity for legal purposes. In many jurisdictions, artificial personality allows that entity to be considered under law separately from its individual members. They may sue and be sued, enter into contracts, incur debt, and own property. Entities with legal personality may also be subjected to certain legal obligations, such as the payment of taxes. An entity with legal personality may shield its members from personal liability.
In some common law jurisdictions a distinction is drawn between corporation aggregate and a corporation sole, which is a public office of legal personality separated from the individual holding the office. Historically most corporations sole were ecclesiastical in nature, but a number of other public offices are now formed as corporations sole.
The concept of juridical personality is not absolute. "Piercing the corporate veil" refers to looking at the individual natural persons acting as agents involved in a company action or decision; this may result in a legal decision in which the rights or duties of a corporation or public limited company are treated as the rights or liabilities of that corporation's members or directors.
The concept of a juridical person is now central to Western law in both common-law and civil-law countries, but it is also found in virtually every other legal system.
Examples
Some examples of juridical persons include:- Cooperatives, business organization owned and democratically operated by a group of individuals for their mutual benefit
- Corporations are bodies corporate created by statute or charter. A corporation sole is a corporation constituted by a single member, in a particular capacity, and that person's successors in the same capacity, in order to give them some legal benefit or advantage, particularly that of perpetuity, which a natural person could not have had. Examples are a religious officiant in that capacity, or The Crown in the Commonwealth realms. A corporation aggregate is a corporation constituted by more than one member.
- * Municipal corporations are created by statutes. Other organizations may be created by statute as legal persons, including European economic interest groupings.
- Unincorporated associations, that is aggregates of two or more persons, are treated as juridical persons in some jurisdictions.
- Partnerships, an aggregate of two or more persons to carry on a business in common for profit and created by agreement. Traditionally, partnerships did not have continuing legal personality, but many jurisdictions now treat them as having an independent legal personality.
- Family can be treated as a legal person.
- Companies are corporations – the term often refers to a business association that carries on an industrial enterprise, although companies may take other forms, such as trade unions, unlimited companies, trusts, and funds. Limited liability companies—be they a private company limited by guarantee, private company limited by shares, or public limited company—are entities having certain characteristics of both a corporation and a partnership. Different types have a complex variety of advantages and disadvantages.
- Sovereign states are legal persons.
- In the international legal system, various organizations possess legal personality. These include intergovernmental organizations and some other international organizations.
- The European Union has legal personality since the Lisbon Treaty entered into force on 1 December 2009. That the EU has legal personality is a prerequisite for the EU to join the European Convention on Human Rights. However, in 2014, the EU decided not to be bound by the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights.
- Temples, in some legal systems, have separate legal personality.
- The Whanganui River was granted legal personality in March 2017 under New Zealand law because the Whanganui Māori tribe regard the river as their ancestor.
- Also, in March 2017, the High Court of Uttarakhand declared the Ganges River a legal "person" in a move that according to one newspaper, "could help in efforts to clean the pollution-choked rivers". As of 6 April 2017, the ruling has been commented on in Indian newspapers to be hard to enforce, with assertions that experts do not anticipate immediate benefits, that the ruling is "hardly game changing", that experts believe "any follow-up action is unlikely", and that the "judgment is deficient to the extent it acted without hearing others who have stakes in the matter". The Supreme Court of India overturned the decision of the High Court of Uttarakhand in July 2017.