10 Dec What Is the Legal Definition of Personhood
With the questions of what criteria we consider necessary for personality (to be a person, you have to have it) and which we consider sufficient personality conditions (if you have them, then you are a person), one could conclude that personality could come in stages. That is, there may be partial persons and one individual is more one person than another. This may sound absurd, but consider the possibility of aliens from another planet who appear to be between chimpanzees and humans. Are they people or not? It may be hard to say, and we might allow them to be partial people. The same could happen if non-human animal species evolve to the point where we recognize that they have some kind of personality. When did they win it? Were they partial people on the way? Or consider the example of an individual severely damaged to the brain, clearly still a human being, but perhaps not entirely a person in the metaphysical sense. The classic discussion of the idea of a legal entity can be found in John Chipman Gray`s The Nature and Sources of the Law. He began his famous discussion: “In law books, as in other books, and in everyday language, `person` is often used as a human being, but the technical legal meaning of a `person` is subject to legal rights and duties.” The question of whether an enterprise is to be regarded as a legal person may be reduced to other questions of whether the enterprise can and should be subject to a number of legal rights and obligations. The set of rights and obligations relating to legal personality varies according to the type of company. Companies and natural persons are legal persons, but have different legal rights and obligations. Nevertheless, legal personality is generally accompanied by the right to property and the possibility of being a party to legal proceedings.
So far, I have treated the category of personality or people as a single category, but that doesn`t have to be the case. We can distinguish three types of persons – natural, legal and legal. Not all legal persons may be natural persons and vice versa; The category of legal persons differs significantly from that of legal persons, but can be considered identical to the category of natural persons. Speculatively, there are several other likely categories of beings that involve personality. [21] There is more to say about terminology, but I would like to conclude with two observations. Some of the debates about “persons” and “personality” may reflect ambiguity in the word “person.” But it is at least possible that one of the senses of the person (roughly the moral sense) is a controversial concept – that is, there may be competing notions of the conceptual person. (See the Legal Theory Lexicon entry for the distinction between concepts and concepts.) Unlike a legal person, legal personality is conferred by positive (or “man-made”) law. Positive law comes in two forms: common law and statutory law. A corporation is a recognized and protected corporation under common law or statutory law. Specifically, a legal entity is a legal entity that may hold and sell, continue or continue property under common law or statutory law.
The “legal person” is also relevant in electoral law. In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010), the Supreme Court upheld the legal personality of corporations seeking to contribute to political campaigns. The Latin word persona probably derives from the Etruscan word phersu with the same meaning and from the Greek πρόσωπον (prosōpon). Its meaning at the end of the Roman period changed to indicate the character of a theatrical performance or court, as it became clear that different people could assume the same role and that legal attributes such as rights, powers and duties followed the role. The same people as actors could play different roles, each with their own legal attributes, sometimes even in the same court appearance. The differences between corporations, corporations and constitutional persons are significant.
The terms cannot be used interchangeably, lest the whole dialogue become incomprehensible and meaningless. For more information about legal entities, see this article from the Yale Law Journal, this article from the Wake Forest Law Review, and the Penn State Journal of Law and International Affairs. The issue is complicated by the fact that we might believe that nonhuman animals have certain rights, have duties, and have moral status as moral patients. It could be argued, for example, that they have the right not to be tortured without reason. But they are not people. So, if you believe that, and also claim that human persons are entitled to moral rights by virtue of their personality, then it must be true that this is only the case for certain rights, because non-human animals that are not persons also have moral rights. As mentioned above, materialists or physicalists believe that a human being is essentially a physical being, with no metaphysically distinct soul or spirit. From this point of view, physical personality and metaphysical personality will be pretty much the same thing. Supporters of the movement see the personality as an attempt to promote Roe v. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision, filling a legal loophole left by Justice Harry Blackmun in the majority opinion when he wrote, “If this personality suggestion is established, the plaintiff`s case naturally collapses, as the fetus` right to life would then be specifically guaranteed by the amendment.” [27] Those who oppose the personality of nonhuman animals are known as human exceptionalists or human supremacists, and rather speciesists. [82] In philosophy, the word “person” can refer to different concepts.
The concept of personality is difficult to define broadly because of its historical and cultural variability and the controversies surrounding its use in certain contexts.