Educational rewrite. Same meanings as the original Living In The Private page on “person”; unique wording. Not legal advice.
In the imaginary world of legal fiction—and all commerce is legal fiction—a “person” is always an artificial “legal person” of one kind or another, generated by law.
“A legal person is any subject matter to which the law attributes a merely legal or fictitious personality. This extension … is one of the most noteworthy feats of the legal imagination … Legal persons, being the arbitrary creations of the law, may be of as many kinds as the law pleases. Those … recognised by our own system, however, all fall within a single class, namely, corporations or bodies corporate.”
Source: Jurisprudence, 7th Edition, Sweet & Maxwell Ltd (1924), Section 113, p. 336.
Dictionary senses used in this study
Natural person. A human being, naturally born, versus a legally generated juridical person. (Black’s Law Dictionary, 2nd Edition; also 7th Edition: a human being, as distinguished from an artificial person created by law.)
Artificial person. A nonhuman entity created by law and legally distinct, owning its own rights and duties. (Black’s, 2nd Edition.)
Juridical person. An entity (as a firm) that is not a single natural person, authorised by law with duties and rights, recognised as having a distinct identity and legal personality. Also called artificial person, juridical entity, juristic person, or legal person; also body corporate. (Black’s, 2nd Edition.)
Statutes often define “person” to include an individual, a firm, a partnership, an association, a fiduciary, an executor or administrator, a governmental entity, a limited liability company, or a corporation. (Example: Indiana Code Title 9, motor-vehicle definitions.)
Individual as a noun may denote a natural person and, in proper cases, may include artificial persons. (Black’s, 6th Edition; see also U.S. v. Middleton, 231 F.3d 1207 (9th Cir. 2000).)
The term “person” does not include the sovereign. — Wilson v. Omaha Indian Tribe, 442 U.S. 653 (1979).
Person on the birth certificate
On the birth certificate, the legal person NAME is framed as a deceased estate trust—which is why definitions of “person” in instruments such as the United States Social Security Act 1935 include “trust or estate”: “The term person means an individual, a trust or estate, a partnership, or a corporation.”
Two entities are openly distinguished in some rights instruments: the legal person and the natural person (nonhuman versus human). The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990, section 29, applies the Bill to legal persons except where provisions otherwise provide—acknowledging that legal persons are not the same thing as natural persons.
Living man / woman
Flesh and blood, born identity, standing, unalienable rights, private capacity. Not generated by registration.
Legal “person”
Artificial, juridical, corporate, trust or estate, all-caps NAME, status, privileges, statutes, public capacity.
All statute laws and acts apply only to persons. The living man or woman is not the same thing as the person on the paper.
Artificial persons appear under role-labels written like titles of stock: homeowner, voter, teacher, landlord, tenant, taxpayer, director, shareholder, cardholder, officer, employer, employee, driver, and so on. A homeowner on a land title deed is often the artificial person (all-capitals name on the deed) who must pay land taxes or risk loss for the living being who thought he or she owned the home—often because the living holds equitable interest while legal title sits with government or the system.
Tax statutes commonly levy charges upon taxable income derived by any “person,” and define person to include individual, company, and other bodies. A tax is a charge laid upon persons or property for support of government. In this educational framing, the person is a creation of the state and a means to extract energy and labour during life to keep the fiction alive—unless the living separates standing from status.
Government needs a medium to interface with the living because the living cannot “speak” to the dead fiction. Hence the person is created, and living people often agree—knowingly or not—to become surety for it.
Man versus person
“Man” (including women and children as human beings) is a term of nature. “Person” is a term of civil law. Who authors civil law? Kings, emperors, or legislatures acting in a sovereign capacity—rules of civil conduct prescribed by the supreme power of a state, historically tied to municipal law of empire.
When government acts as if it were sovereign over living people outside delegated constitutional bounds, it acts beyond proper authority. A man and a person are different labels for different things. Roman civil law and fictions of law—assumptions contrary to natural order—underwrite the “person” of civil society.
Related: A “Person” Has No Body, When You Are Born, Meet Your Straw Man, Your Consent, Jurisdiction Is the Key.