Legal person - Indian Laws - General

Legal person The foundational principle of a legal system is that it must recognise the subjects it seeks to govern. This is done by the law recognising distinct legal units or legal persons. To be a legal person is to be recognised by the law as a subject which embodies rights, entitlements, liabilities and duties. The law may directly regulate the behaviour of legal persons and their behaviour in relation to each other. Therefore, to be a legal person is to possess certain rights and duties under the law and to be capable of engaging in legally enforceable relationships with other legal persons. Who or what is a legal person is a function of the legal system. The ability to create or recognise legal persons has always varied depending upon historic circumstances. The power of legal systems to recognise and hence also to deny legal personality has been used over history to wreak fundamental breaches of human rights. Roscoe Pound alludes to this in the following passage in Jurisprudence: In civilised lands even in the modern world it has happened that all human beings were not legal persons. In Roman law down to the constitution of Antonius Pius the slave was not a person. He enjoyed neither rights of family nor rights of patrimony. He was a thing, and as such like animals, could be the object of rights of property. In French colonies, before slavery was there abolished, slaves were put in the class of legal persons by the statute of April 23, 1833 and obtained a somewhat extended juridical capacity by a statute of 1845. In the United States down to the Civil War, the free Negroes in many of the States were free human beings with no legal rights. Pound s observations were extracted by this Court in Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, Amritsar v Som Nath Dass, where a two judge Bench of this Court had to determine whether the Guru Granth Sahib possessed a legal personality. While discussing who is a legal person Justice A P Misra observed: 11. If we trace the history of a person in the various countries we find surprisingly it has projected differently at different times. 13. With the development of society, where an individual s interaction fell short, cooperation of a larger circle of individuals was necessitated. Thus, institutions like corporations and companies were created, to help the society in achieving the desired result. The very constitution of a State, municipal corporation, company etc. are all creations of the law and these juristic persons arose out of necessities in the human development. In other words, they were dressed in a cloak to be recognised in law to be a legal unit. The legal development is nonetheless well documented. Salmond in his work titled Jurisprudence notes: Conversely there are, in the law, persons who are not men. A joint-stock company or a municipal corporation is a person in legal contemplation. It is true that it is only a fictitious, not a real person; but it is not a fictitious man. It is personality, not human nature, that is fictitiously attributed by the law to bodies corporate. So far as legal theory is concerned, a person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties. Any being that is so capable is a person, whether a human being or not, and no being that is not so capable is a person, even though he be a man. Persons are the substance of which rights and duties are the attributes. It is only in this respect that persons possess juridical significance, and this is the exclusive point of view from which personality receives legal recognition. But we may go one step further than this in the analysis. No being is capable of rights, unless also capable of interests which may be affected by the acts of others. For every right involves an underlying interest of this nature. Similarly no being is capable of duties, unless also capable of acts by which the interests of others may be affected. To attribute rights and duties, therefore, is to attribute interests and acts as their necessary bases. A person, then, may be defined for the purposes of the law, as any being to whom the law attributes a capability of interests and therefore of rights, of acts and therefore of duties. A legal person possesses a capability to bear interests, rights and duties . Salmond makes a crucial distinction between legal personality and the physical corpus on which legal personality is conferred: The law, in creating persons, always does so by personifying some real thing. Such a person has to this extent a real existence, and it is his personality alone that is fictitious. There is, indeed, no theoretical necessity for this, since the law might, if it so pleased, attribute the quality of personality to a purely imaginary being, and yet attain the ends for which this fictitious extension of personality is devised. Personification, however, conduces so greatly to simplicity of thought and speech, that its aid is invariably accepted. The thing personified may be termed the corpus of the legal person so created; it is the body into which the law infuses the animus of a fictitious personality. Legal persons , being the arbitrary creations of the law, may be as of as many kinds as the law pleases. Those which are actually recognised by our own system, however, all fall within a single class, namely corporations or bodies corporate. A corporation is a group or series of persons which by a legal fiction is regarded and treated as itself a person. If, however, we take account of other systems of our own, we find that the conception of legal personality is not so limited in its application By conferring legal personality, legal systems have expanded the definition of a legal person beyond natural persons . Juristic persons so created do not possess human nature. But their legal personality consists of the rights and duties ascribed to them by statute or by the courts to achieve the purpose sought to be achieved by the conferral of such personality. It is important to understand the circumstances in which legal personality has been conferred and consequently the rights and duties ascribed to the inanimate objects on which this conferment takes place. As observed by Salmond , so long as the conferral of legal personality serves the purpose sought to be achieved, legal personality may even be conferred on an abstract idea. In the case of Hindu idols, legal personality is not conferred on the idol simpliciter but on the underlying pious purpose of the continued worship of the deity as incarnated in the idol. Where the legal personality is conferred on the purpose of a deity s continued worship, moving or destroying the idol does not affect its legal personality. The legal personality vests in the purpose of continued worship of the idol as recognised by the court. It is for the protection of the continued worship that the law recognises this purpose and seeks to protect it by the conferral of juristic personality. M. SIDDIQ (D) THR. LRS. VERSUS MAHANT SURESH DAS AND ORS. - 2019 (11) TMI 1396 - SUPREME COURT