Brazilian law recognizes any association or abstract entity as a legal entity, but a registry is required by a constitutional document, with specifications that depend on the category of legal entity and the local law of the state and city. Legal personality allows one or more natural persons (universitas personarum) to act as an entity (legal person) for legal purposes. In many jurisdictions, artificial personality allows this company to be considered legally distinct from its individual members (for example, in a public company, its shareholders). They can sue and be sued, enter into contracts, incur debts and own property. Companies with legal personality may also be subject to certain legal obligations, such as the payment of taxes. A company with legal personality may protect its members from personal liability. I argue in this chapter that many of these “anything goes” claims are actually based on a merger of two different meanings of “legal person”: the term is used to refer to both a set of legal positions and an entity representing these legal positions, and these different meanings are not clearly separated. This leads to problematic claims and non-balancing. After distinguishing between these two meanings (and calling one of them a “legal platform”), I will address the question of who or what a legal entity can be. Here, I would suggest that the question of “who or what can be a corporation?” is best addressed by determining who or what may have legal entity incidents.

However, any clear conclusion concerning the domain of the legal person requires the assumption of certain valuation assumptions, for example with regard to the entities to which (or to which) obligations may be performed. I would argue that there would be no problem with extending legal personality to animals, whereas extending to rivers or idols would. In particular, categories 2 and 3 are very diverse in their instantiations. For example, even if a jurisdiction follows the model of supporting persons with disabilities and thus grants them independence in the exercise of legal acts, these persons may not be considered fully culpable in criminal law. Stone`s proposal is not objectionable as long as it is understood as a practical means of improving environmental protection in the face of a particular doctrine of reputation: it is a legal fiction, an extension of certain legal rules to situations that its paradigmatic formulations would not cover. However, this jurisdictional dependent justification for a legal fiction does not mean that natural objects should be treated as potential legal persons in philosophical analysis. If we accept the valuation assumptions I have adopted, we must reject the potential legal personality of insensitive natural objects. A duty not to pollute a lake can therefore be understood as an obligation to the general public or to all or some sentient beings collectively.

This is also how the question is framed in many countries, such as Finland, where conservation societies are empowered in certain cases to take action against government agencies if they consider that a government decision violates the Environmental Protection Act.46 Such action can be taken regardless of whether the organization itself suffers direct harm as a result of the decision. Here, the organization is simply referred to as a complainant or plaintiff, even if it represents a public interest.47 As a rule, inheritance and personality coincide, so that a person has only one heir, which includes all of his or her estate and liabilities. However, in a trust, there are two assets held by one person. A trustee, like everyone else, has his or her own private (or general) inheritance. But in addition, he has the fiduciary inheritance. The two goods are legally distinct and should also be separated in practice by appropriate labelling and accounting. The assets of one estate cannot normally be transferred to the other. And when an asset is sold from an inheritance, the proceeds of the sale are paid into the same inheritance . 24 As has already been stated, the view that `[t]he thing may be a legal person because legal persons are designated or defined as such` is non sequitur.

To show this, we should first examine what the claim “legal persons are fixed as such or defined in existence” actually means. Lawson provides a relatively good account of this: artificial personality, legal personality, or legal personality is the trait of a non-living entity that legally has personality status. Eilionóir Flynn and Anna Arstein-Kerslake present an example of how the independent legal personality of a disabled person works. They advocated a model of supported decision-making, where a person with a disability “selects a number of trusted persons to support the decision-making process.” “However, support can only be offered to one person, and they should be free to accept or refuse support – that is, Assisted decision-making should never be imposed on a person against their will.” 55 The support model envisaged by Flynn and Arstein-Kerslake is regarded as an independent legal person, since the disabled person has the final say in the performance of a legal act. However, there are most likely persons with disabilities whose decision-making capacity is so limited that the support model would not be appropriate, as Flynn and Arstein-Kerslake acknowledge (albeit reluctantly).56 If these persons cannot perform legal acts, they cannot be independent legal persons. Registered trade unions are legal persons. They may, by uniform representation proportional to their members, conclude collective agreements binding on all persons belonging to the categories specified in the agreement. There really is only one class of beings unquestionably endowed with an incriminating legal personality: sane adult human beings. Most lawyers will probably agree that, under normal circumstances, it is not only possible, but also morally non-problematic, for ordinary adults to be held legally liable.

However, medieval animal experimentation reminds us that contemporary restrictions on the scope of criminal law, which exclude infants and animals, for example, from its scope, are not conceptual but moral limits. Infants and animals can be held criminally liable: they can commit prohibited acts and be punished for them. Such punishments can obviously be unfair and unjust, but it`s not hard to see how animals could be punished – when it would be harder to understand what “punishing” a falling tree damaging a building would mean in the first place. Cutting the tree into small pieces might give the appearance of “retaliation,” but it would be an exaggeration to call it punishment. What for? Here, too, we cannot fully assess our obligations.