Legal Personality

Abstract

To be a legal person is to be the subject of rights and duties.To confer legal rights or to impose legal duties, therefore, is to confer legal personality.2If society by effective sanctions and through its agents will coerce A to act or to forbear in favor of B, B has a right and A owes a duty.3 Predictability of societal action, therefore, determines rights and duties and rights and duties determine legal personality.Whatever the controversies about the "essential nature" of legal personality, there seems to be a uniform concurrence in these as respectively the test of its existence in a given subject, and the manner in which it is conferred, whether upon a natural person or upon an inanimate thing.Among definitions to be found in discussions of the subject, perhaps the most satisfactory is that legal personality is the capacity for legal relations.-Butthere is, nevertheless, an objection to the word "capacity" which seems of some importance.It suggests the possibility that the subject may have a capacity for legal relations without yet having become a party to such relations.A minor with capacity to marry is not necessarily married, whereas, when legal personality is conferred, the sub-IThis paper was read before the Round Table on Business Associations at the meeting of the Association of American Law Schools at Chicago in December, 1926.

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