Q what are persons and explain the legal status of animals, slaves, dead men and unborn persons?
Q what are characteristics of a person? Natural and legal person.
Q difference between natural and legal person. (S.N)?
A person is define as 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. The prime case of a person is human being, so to personify an object is to imagine it is endowed with such attributes.
In the common-law tradition, only a person could sue or be sued.In canon law, the doctrine of persona ficta allowed monasteries to have a legal existence that was apart from the monks.
So far as legal theory is concerned a person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties. Any being who 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. in law however, there may be persons who are not men. A joint attock company or a municipal corporation is a person in legal contemplation. In hindu law, idols are legal persons. Persons are the substances of which the rights and duties are the attributes. it is only in this respect that persons possess judicial significance, and this is the exclusive point of view from which personality receives legal recognition.
Kinds of persons: Persons as so defined are of two kinds, distinguishable as natural and legal.
Natural person: A natural person is a human being. It posses following characteristics belonging particularly to mankind:
-Power of thought: a natural person is a real living human being, a person with a distinct personality. He generally has the power to think his own thoughts and make his own choices, though a person who is not competent to make his own decisions is still a natural person.
-Limited life: a natural person and a legal person is that a natural person has a limited lifespan. Typically, a natural person does not live longer than 100 years
-Living being: a natural person can only be classified as a living, breathing human being.
-Speech and choice: a natural can speak and fight for its rights. a natural person is guaranteed a set of basic human rights, including life, liberty, and property.
Legal person: legal persons are being, real or imaginary, who for the purpose of legal reasoning are treated in greater or less degree in the same way as human beings. They are also termed as fictitious, juristic, artificial or moral. The subject matter, the thing so personified may be termed the corpus of the legal person so created into which the law infuses the animus of a fictitious personality. Following are the main types of legal person:
1. Corporations: Corporation is a group or series of persons which by legal fiction is regarded and treated as itself a person. Such as trade unions and friendly societies.
2. Institutions: the law regards that instead of giving personality to a number of person connected with the institution, the law may attribute personality to the institution itself. Such as church, hospitals university, etc.
3. Charities: a charitable fund, a trust-estate, etc may also be endowed with personality.
Legal status of the animals: beasts are not person, either natural or legal. They are merely things- often the object of legal rights and duties. It is incapable of legal rights as of legal duties, for its interest receive no recognition from the law. yet their acts are neither lawful or unlawful. There are however two cases in which the beast, may be thought to possess legal rights. In the first place, cruelty to animals is a criminal offence, and in second place, a trust for the benefit of particular classes of animals
Legal status of dead men: dead men are no l0onger person in the eye of the law. they have laid down their legal personality with their lives, and are now as destitute of rights as of liabilities. They have no rights because they have no interesrs. Although all a man’s rights and interest perish with, yet the law recognizes three things in which he would have been interest when alive; his body, his reputation and his estate.
Legal status of slaves: in law however, however, there may be men who are not person; slaves for example are destitute of legal personality in any system which regards them as incapable of either rights or liabilities.
Legal status of unborn person: There is nothing to prevent a man from owning property before he is born though his ownership is a necessarily contingent, because he may never be born at all. A child en ventre sa mere is recognised by law as a person in being for some purposes. Abortion and child destruction are criminal offences. But the rights of an unborn person, whether personal or proprietary, are contingent on his birth as a living human being.
