Legal person

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..... nction 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 the .....

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..... n. 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 re .....

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..... 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 .....

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