Limitations
There are limitations to the legal recognition of legal persons. Legal entities cannot marry, they usually cannot vote or hold public office, and in most jurisdictions there are certain positions which they cannot occupy. The extent to which a legal entity can commit a crime varies from country to country. Certain countries prohibit a legal entity from holding human rights; other countries permit artificial persons to enjoy certain protections from the state that are traditionally described as human rights.
Special rules apply to legal persons in relation to the law of defamation. Defamation is the area of law in which a person's reputation has been unlawfully damaged. This is considered an ill in itself in regard to natural person, but a legal person is required to show actual or likely monetary loss before a suit for defamation will succeed.
Usually a natural person perpetrates a crime, but legal persons may also commit crimes. Conversely, at least under U.S. Law, nonpersons such as animals cannot commit crimes.
Read more about this topic: Legal Entity
Famous quotes containing the word limitations:
“The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chromium bathroom.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“That all may be so, but when I begin to exercise that power I am not conscious of the power, but only of the limitations imposed on me.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)
“The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)