There is really only one class of beings who are unquestionably endowed with an incriminating legal personality: adults with a healthy mind. Most lawyers will likely agree that, under normal circumstances, it is not only possible, but also morally non-problematic, that adults with common sense are held legally responsible. However, medieval experiences on animals remind us that contemporary restrictions on the scope of criminal law, which exclude infants and animals, for example, from its scope, are not conceptual limitations, but rather moral limitations. Infants and non-human animals can be held criminally responsible: they can commit prohibited acts and be punished for them. Such punishments can obviously be unfair and unjust, but it`s not hard to understand how animals could be punished – when it would be harder to understand what „punishing,” say, a tree that damages a building would even entail. Cutting the tree into small pieces might have a semblance of „retaliation,” but it would be an exaggeration to call it punishment. What for? Here, too, we cannot completely evade the evaluation obligations. Questions such as who or what can be punished significantly are based on thin commitments regarding the purpose of the punishment. An important aspect of being a legal entity is that you comply with at least one legal platform, which means that you own the claims and charges that affect that platform. I call this appendix: Legal platforms connect to legal entities. As single-member companies such as Mary Inc. and Scottish Trusts illustrate, multiple legal platforms can be connected to a single legal entity.27 (If it weren`t, it might not even have to distinguish between „legal platform” and „legal entity”).) The active legal person therefore consists of two main events: legal liability (incriminating legal person) and the ability to act within the framework of the law (endowed with legal competences).
The main types of legal liability are criminal and civil liability, while the ability to perform legal acts opens up the possibility of participating in various legal institutions, probably the most important of which is procurement. Many scholars distinguish between the status of „beneficiary” of rights and that of „administrator” of rights.49 This distinction highlights a relevant threshold between the passive legal person and the active legal person: an infant cannot manage his physical legal platform, but a legal system generally grants him an increasing number of administrative capacities as he grows. It will also be increasingly held accountable for how it exercises these powers. However, not all forms of legal liability arise from legal acts in this way, and some do not in fact refer at all to the capacity to act. This is particularly evident in agreements in which certain individuals or creatures are held criminally responsible, but are not otherwise endowed with legal personality, as was the case in some American slave states before the war and the medieval animal trials.50 I call this a purely incriminating legal entity. In recommendations 10, 11 and 20, the term „law” refers to all laws promulgated or approved by parliamentary procedure or other equivalent means provided for in the country`s constitutional framework, which imposes binding requirements with sanctions for non-compliance. Penalties for non-compliance should be effective, proportionate and dissuasive (see Recommendation 35). The concept of law also includes court decisions that impose relevant requirements and are binding and authoritative in all regions of the country (as this term is used in the note on the legal basis of requirements for financial institutions and DNFBP). We should first point out here that every human being generally corresponds to what Reid called a „private being,” and what I call an allusion to the term „natural person.” This is the legal platform that, in normal cases, accompanies a person from the cradle – perhaps even from the womb – to the grave. In exceptional cases, X`s legal platform may no longer be linked to X, for example if X loses all proof of identity.
It is also theoretically possible to steal someone else`s identity and thus have control of that person`s natural legal platform.32 A much more common example of control over multiple legal platforms is, of course, the creation of a one-person business. The company must be given a name to clearly indicate when Mary performs an act in the law on behalf of her company of a single woman and not in her own name, as this determines the legal platform from which new claims and charges become a party. Mary therefore has two different legal masks, „Mary” and „Mary Inc.” (see Figure 4.1). Since the 19th century, the legal entity has been interpreted in such a way as to make it a citizen, resident or resident of a state (usually for purposes of personal jurisdiction). In Louisville, C. & C.R. Co. v.
Letson, 2 How. 497, 558, 11 L.Ed. 353 (1844), the Supreme Court of the United States held that, for the purposes of the present case, an enterprise „is likely to be treated in the same way as a natural person as a citizen [of the State which created it]”. Ten years later, they reaffirmed Letson`s conclusion, albeit on the slightly different theory that „those who use the company`s name and exercise the powers it confers” should be conclusively considered citizens of the company`s founding state. Marshall v. Baltimore & Ohio R. Co., 16 How. 314, 329, 14 L.Ed. 953 (1854).
These concepts have been codified by law because U.S. jurisdiction laws refer specifically to the corporate headquarters. In particular, each State Party shall ensure that legal persons held responsible under this article are liable to effective, proportionate and dissuasive criminal or non-criminal sanctions, including financial penalties. In this case, many theories of personal identity would hold X responsible for the actions, while X`s legal liability would only extend to the responsibilities of the company. The number of skills held by an ordinary human individual usually increases gradually until the age of majority. Babies have no skills and have no homework; But as they grow, the legal system usually grants them an increasing number of legal powers. While children and the mentally handicapped have skills, in most cases they are limited in number and type. It is important to remember that, in most cases, the justification for these restrictions is moral rather than conceptual: limiting the number of skills these people possess is done for their own good, as they lack the necessary mental abilities.54 I see no conceptual barriers that would prevent most minors or people with mental disabilities from exercising skills independently.
Legal acts shall contain as a necessary element the intention to entail a legal consequence. Such intentions presuppose a certain understanding of institutional reality and how to manipulate that reality through the use of symbols.