Identity/personality
In early laws, an outlaw was a person who, by judicial process, was deprived of all normal rights as a human being unless and until a court reversed itself through an affirmative act of inlawry. This was a form of civil death. Similarly, a slave was a chattel or possession, and had no legal personality except that, in the U.S., some of the Free States did allow limited legal personality. Legal personality could be surrendered voluntarily by becoming a monk or by travelling, e.g. the first provisions of the French Civil Code deny civil rights to foreigners. As an aspect of the social contract between a state and the citizens who owe it allegiance, most developed legal systems contain positive provisions defining each individual's legal identity and its attributes. All matters of social rank or caste are examples of personal status, the modern extremes of which would be nobility and the 200 million dalits, the untouchables of India.
Full age or minority are in many laws treated as aspects of personal status. The same thing is true of the loss of capacity by reason of insanity or other mental illness. This is of critical importance if a person wishes to enter into a marriage or a contract having travelled to a state where the age of minority is different or the form of marriage is apparently not consistent with the laws of the "home" state.
Fictitious persons or legal entities may be created by law through the act of incorporation and these corporations are quite separate from the natural persons who may be involved. The holders of some public offices are vested with the office, its terms are fixed by law, and every person within the state must recognise the existence of the office and its rights and duties, e.g. an archbishop or a corporation may represent a business association with its own purposes and capacities. It would be commercially inconvenient if the status of the entity changed depending on the laws of the place where commercial transactions were effected. For example, general partnerships have a separate legal personality in some states but not in others.
Read more about this topic: Legal Status
Famous quotes containing the words identity and/or personality:
“One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“From infancy, a growing girl creates a tapestry of ever-deepening and ever- enlarging relationships, with her self at the center. . . . The feminine personality comes to define itself within relationship and connection, where growth includes greater and greater complexities of interaction.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)