PERSONS

Introduction :
PERSON. This word is applied to men, women and children. In law, man and person are not exactly synonymous terms. Any human being is a man, whether he be a member of society or not, whatever may be the rank he holds, or whatever may be his age, sex, &c. A person is a man considered according to the rank he holds in society, with all the rights to which the place he holds entitles him, and the duties which it imposes. 1 Bouv. Inst. n. 137. Illegitimate children are "persons" within the meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The phrase interested person refers to heirs, devisees, children, spouses, creditors, beneficiaries, and any others having a property right in, or a claim against, a trust estate or the estate of a decedent, ward, or protected person. It also refers to personal representatives and to fiduciaries.

Types of persons :
Natural person Corporation

Natural person:
Natural persons are divided into males, or men; and females or women. Men are capable of all kinds of engagements and functions, unless by reasons applying to particular individuals. Women cannot be appointed to any public office, nor perform any civil functions, except those which the law specially declares them capable of exercising. Civ. Code of Louis. art. 25. 5. They are also sometimes divided into free persons and slaves. Freemen are those who have preserved their natural liberty, that is to say, who have the right of doing what is not forbidden by the law. A slave is one who is in the power of a master to whom he belongs. Slaves are sometimes ranked not with persons but things. But sometimes they are considered as persons for example, a negro is in contemplation of law a person, so as to be capable of committing a riot in conjunction with white men. 1 Bay, 358. Vide Man. 6. Persons are also divided into citizens, (q.v.) and aliens, (q.v.) when viewed with regard to their political rights. When they are considered in relation to their civil rights, they are living or civilly dead; vide Civil Death; outlaws; and infamous persons.

Corporation :
A corporation is a "person" for purposes of the constitutional guarantees of EQUAL PROTECTION OF LAWS and Due Process of Law.Corporation is an artificial person. 1 Bl. Com. 123; 4 Bing. 669; C. 33 Eng. C. L R. 488; Woodes. Lect. 116; Bac. Us. 57; 1 Mod. 164. But when the word "Persons" is spoken of in legislative acts, natural persons

will be intended, unless something appear in the context to show that it applies to artificial persons. 1 Scam. R. 178.

Difference between corporation and natural person:

In many cases, fundamental human rights are implicitly granted only to natural persons. For example, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states a person cannot be denied the right to vote based on gender, or Section Fifteen of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees equality rights, apply to natural persons only. Another example of the distinction between natural and legal persons is that a natural person can hold public office, but a corporation cannot. A corporation can, however, file a lawsuit or own property as a legal perso In many cases, fundamental human rights are implicitly granted only to natural persons. For example, the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states a person cannot be denied the right to vote based on gender, or Section Fifteen of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees equality rights, apply to natural persons only. Another example of the distinction between natural and lega

Categories of persons
1.Persons are also divided into citizens, (q.v.) and aliens, (q.v.) when viewed with regard to their political rights. When

they are considered in relation to their civil rights, they are living or civilly dead; vide Civil Death; outlaws; and infamous person 2. Persons are divided into legitimates and bastards, when examined as to their rights by birth. 3. When viewed in their domestic relations, they are divided into parents and children; husbands and wives; guardians and wards; and masters and servants son, as it is understood in law, see 1 Toull. n. 168; 1 Bouv. Inst. n. 1890, note.

Persons in law
We cannot understand the self by examining people in isolation. Too many important aspects of personhood only appear in a social context. Thomas Metzingers work describes the self-model in which our ideas about ourselves are rooted. The model is (usually) transparent, in that we operate through it without (usually) any awareness of a distinction between the model and the underlying reality. It is a model to which we have a profound emotional attachmentmost of us care, deeply, about ourselves in the past, present, and future. As a result, our selfmodels are motivational. They spur and shape our actions. We evaluate possible courses of action by putting our self-models through various simulations, and responding emotionally to the different outcomes we imagine. The research of Antonio Damasiohas begun to show how our emotions must inform our executive decision-making processes in order for us to

make what are commonly recognized as rational decisions. Most of what Metzinger and Damasio have to say about the self is as true of isolated individuals as of human beings immersed in society. But a case can be made that the concept of the self could only have emerged in a social context. I have argued that our concepts, particularly the entities recognized by our ontology, reflect what is important to us. The spatio-temporal boundaries between things are artificial, not natural; they do not exist in nature, but are imposed upon nature by human beings. A person is an entity whose boundaries roughly coincide with those of a human biological organism. A person is commonly considered to begin sometime around birth; sooner in some traditions, later in others. The person is usually thought to persist until biological death; but many people believe that it continues much longer than that; and some believe that if the organism is sufficiently damaged, then the person may cease to exist before its organism dies.

Among other things, a person is a unit of moral and legal responsibilitya bearer of enduring rights and privileges, duties and obligations, merits and demerits, assets and liabilities, debts and credits. Those attributes of individual persons result from, and depend on, the fact that individuals are members of a larger society. If a human being is isolated for a long time from other human beings, legal obligation disappears from his life, and moral obligation, if it does not entirely disappear, is vastly curtailed. I would not go so far as to say that an isolated human being ceases to

be a person; only that certain central and important aspects of personhood simply disappear from his or her life. Having moral and legal rights and obligations is a central and important aspect of personhood. Laws are, for the most part, a carefully worked-out distillation of widely-shared principles and values. (At least that is true in democracies.) A societys laws tend to reflect what is important to its members. And one of the most central ideas in law is the concept of a person. If we want to understand personhood, we cannot ignore the legal concept of a person. It would be quixotic to recommend reforming the concept of a person without considering the implications of such conceptual reform for the law.

Persons in roman law

Roman law is divided by Gaius and Justinian into persons, things, and actions. We begin therefore, like them, with the law of persons. But we cover it very much more briefly, for it is the area where Roman law seems to have had the least effect on the modern world. In so far as the law of persons is concerned with questions of citizenship and public status, the Roman rules were very different from the ones found in todays legal systems. Roman society was very different from ours; and, of course, questions of citizenship will seem more important in a large Empire than in a small country. In so far as the law of persons concerns the distinction between free

people and slaves, the fact that we do not recognise slavery makes the Roman law largely irrelevant. And in so far as the law of persons is concerned with the family, Roman family structure differed hugely from ours.

We do need to look at these things in outline, though, partly for their own sake and partly for the sake of understanding other bits of Roman law.

Persons and People

People is a more or less simple factual concept: human beings. Persons is a legal construct that overlaps with this but is not identical to it. Most people are persons, most persons are people; but not all. For the Romans, the most obvious category of people that are not persons is slaves. English law has known analogous categories, such as outlaws and monks; and today, while we are uncertain about whether we regard pre-natal children as people, there is no doubt that they are not persons. Modern legal systems treat a whole raft of non-human entities as persons. Essentially, any body that is capable of

bearing legal rights or duties is a legal person. Very obvious examples are limited companies, Cambridge colleges, states. Behind all of these there is a good deal of theorising about the nature of legal personality. Roman law had no such theory, but did recognise some entities that bore rights and duties and which we would regard as legal persons: the Roman people, states, towns, collegia. This type of entity became more important in the later Empire, but for practical purposes we can ignore them.

CONCLUSION