Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 June 2019
Perhaps the most powerful act of law is to make and define a legal person. A legal person is the subject of legal rights and duties.1 Only those who are legally recognized as persons have the capacity to participate in legal relations. Legal personhood has never been a self-evident classification that applies only to living human beings. In fact, one’s status as a human being is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a person in the eyes of the law. Non-human organizational entities are treated as legal persons for some purposes, while human beings like infants and mentally impaired individuals are not regarded as full-fledged legal persons for other purposes.
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