Chapter XV — Persons
§ 108 The Nature of Personality
The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the legal conception of personality. It is not permissible to adopt the simple device of saying that a person means a human being, for even in the popular or non-legal use of the term there are persons who are not men. Personality is a wider and vaguer term than humanity. Gods, angels, and the spirits of the dead are persons, no less than men are. And in the law this want of coincidence between the class of persons and that of human beings is still more marked. In the law there may be men who are not persons; slaves, for example, are destitute of legal personality in any system which regards them as incapable of either rights or liabilities. Like cattle, they are things and the objects of rights; not persons and the subjects of them. 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 or 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 substances 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.
Persons as so defined are of two kinds, distinguishable as natural and legal. A natural person is a being to whom the law attributes personality in accordance with reality and truth. Legal persons are beings, real or imaginary, to whom the law attributes personality by way of fiction, when there is none in fact. Natural persons are persons in fact as well as in law; legal persons are persons in law but not in fact.256