Who is a Legal Person?

By Shiva Naman 10 Minutes Read

INTRODUCTION

Who is a Person?

A person (plural people or persons) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of property, or legal responsibility. Earlier the word person had a different meaning but in today’s world, it simply means a living person having rights and duties. In philosophical terms, a person is one who can be distinguished by consciousness, rationality, and a moral sense, and traditionally thought of as consisting of both a body and a mind or soul.

In legal terms, a person is an entity recognized by the law as separate and independent, with legal rights and existence including the ability to sue and be sued, to sign contracts, to receive gifts, to appear in court either by themselves or by a lawyer and, generally, other powers incidental to the full expression of the entity in law.

History of “Person” and its Definition by Various Jurists

Originally the word “person” is derived from the Latin word “persona”. This term carries a long history. In the very beginning, it simply meant a mask. Later on, it was used to denote the part played by a man in life. After that, it was used in the sense of the man who played the part. In later, Roman law, the term persona. Last, of all, the term is used in the sense of a being who is capable of sustaining rights and duties.

Many definitions of persons have been given by various jurists, three of them are as follows:

• SALMOND defines a “person” as, “any being to whom the law regards as capable of rights or duties, any being that is so capable, is a person whether a human being or not and nothing that is not so capable is a person even though he may not be a man”[1].
• According to GRAY, a person is an entity to which rights and duties may be attributed.
• SAVIGNY has defined the term “person” as the “subject or bearer of a right” but, as pointed out by HOLLAND, this definition is not exhaustive. Rights avail against persons as much as they are reposed in them.

Under the Indian penal code, the word person includes any company or association, or body of persons, whether incorporated or not. In the philosophical sense, personality is the basis of a human being. In the legal sense, it is the capacity of being a “right and duly hearing unity”.

Legal personality is a device by which law creates units to which it attributes certain legal rights and duties. Legal personality is an artificial custom of the law. Thus “person” in the juristic term are of two kinds namely natural and legal. The former are human beings capable of rights and duties. Legal persons are beings who may be really “natural” or imaginary “artificial” in whom law vests rights and duties and thus attributes personality by way of fiction.

TYPES OF PERSONS

When we consider a person in terms of the law, it recognizes only two kinds of persons, namely:

• Natural persons
• Legal persons

Natural Persons: A natural person is a living human being. But all living human beings are not necessarily be recognized as persons in the law. According to HOLLAND, “A natural person is such a human being as is regarded by the law as capable of rights and duties – in the language of Roman law, as having status. These are the living human beings recognized as persons by the state”. The first requisite of a normal human being is that he must be recognized as possessing a sufficient status to enable him to possess rights and duties.[2]

Legal Persons: Legal persons are defined as a mass of property, a group of human beings, or an institution upon whom the law has conferred a legal status and who are in the eye of law capable of having rights and duties as natural persons. In other words, a legal person has real existence but it carries fictitious personality. Personification is essential for all legal personalities but vice versa is not true, that is, personification does not create personality. Personification is a mere metaphor. It is used merely because it simplifies thought and expression.[3]

A legal person is not something that exists upon the idea of legal status, rather its elements give it the status of that rights. There are two essentials of a legal person and these are:

• The corpus.
• The animus.

The corpus is stated as the body into which the law infuses the animus (animus is the personality or the will of the person).[4]

KINDS OF LEGAL PERSON

There Are Three Kinds of Legal Persons:

1. Groups or series of men

They are usually called corporations. Mainly the first class of legal persons consists of corporations, namely those which are constituted by the personification of groups (e.g., corporation aggregate) or series of individuals (e.g., corporation sole).

In one of the famous cases, the Court observed that “corporations are undoubtedly legal persons but is not a citizen within the meaning of Article 19 of the Constitution and cannot ask for the enforcement of fundamental rights granted to citizens under the said article”[5].

2. Institutions

Institutions like hospitals, libraries, etc. This can be termed as second class, in which the corporations or object selected for personification not a group or series of persons but an institution is. The law may, if it pleases, regard a church, a hospital or a university or a library as a person more specifically it can be said that it may attribute personality not to any group of persons connected with the institution, but to the institution itself.

• In India, institutions like universities, temples, public authorities, etc. are considered as legal persons.
• Under Indian law, trade unions and friendly societies are legal entities. They own properties and suits can be brought in their names though not regarded as corporations.

3. Funds or estates

The third kind of legal person is that in which the corpus is some fund or estate devoted to special uses, a charitable fund for example, or a trust estate, or the property of a dead man or a bankrupt.

CONCLUSION

When one analyses the importance of a legal personality it becomes clear that having the legal qualities or being incorporated as a legal personality has great importance as it attributes legal characteristics to non-living entities such as companies, institutions, and a group of individuals which helps in one way or the other, determining their rights and duties. Clothed with legal personality, these non-living entities can own, use, and dispose of the property in their names on the other hand unincorporated institutions are denied this advantage because their existence is not distinguished.

Professor KELSON emphasized through his analytical approach to legal personality and thus concluded that there is no divergence between natural persons and legal persons for the law. In law “personality” implies conferment of rights and duties therefore, rather it is for the convenient attribution of rights and duties, the conception of legal or juristic personality should be used in its procedural form.

[1] SALMOND: Jurisprudence (12th Ed.) P.229
[2] N.V. Paranjapaye, Studies in Jurisprudence and Legal Theory, Central Law Agency, Allahabad, 2010
[3] Dr. S.R. Myneni, Jurisprudence, Asia Law House, Hyderabad, 2010
[4] SALMOND: Jurisprudence (12th Ed.) P.306
[5] State Trading Corporation of India v. Commercial Tax Officer, A.I.R. 1963 S.C. 1811

Shiva Naman