Definition
An artificial person is a legal entity recognized by law as having rights, duties, and legal capacity distinct from the human beings who create or compose it. The law treats such an entity as a "person" capable of owning property, entering contracts, suing and being sued, and bearing legal obligations — even though it has no physical body, mind, or natural existence.
The classic example is the corporation, but the category extends to any entity to which law grants legal personality: limited liability companies, partnerships (in certain respects), municipalities, government agencies, trusts (in some jurisdictions), and, increasingly, novel constructs whose status is actively contested.
The concept rests on a fundamental legal distinction: natural persons are human beings whose legal personality derives from birth; artificial persons are constructs whose legal personality derives entirely from legal recognition — statute, charter, court decision, or custom. Remove the legal recognition, and the artificial person ceases to exist. A human being does not depend on law to exist; a corporation does.
Common Language
Wiktionary: Plural of artificial person.
Webster's 1913: Webster's 1913 does not carry a standalone entry for "artificial person," though "artificial" appears as an adjective meaning "made or contrived by art; produced or modified by human skill and labor." "Person" is defined broadly to include any human individual or, in law, a body of persons or a corporation treated as an individual.
The gap matters. In ordinary English, "artificial" connotes something synthetic, imitative, or lesser — a substitute for the real thing. In law, the designation carries no such hierarchy. An artificial person is not a lesser person; it is a different category of legal subject, possessing precisely those legal capacities the law chooses to grant it. Researchers encountering the term in historical sources should resist the instinct to read "artificial" as pejorative or provisional.
Common Confusion
Artificial persons are frequently conflated with related but distinct concepts. "Legal person" is the broader category — all artificial persons are legal persons, but "legal person" also encompasses natural persons in their legal capacity. "Juridical person" is largely synonymous with artificial person and is the preferred term in civil law systems; researchers working across common law and civil law sources will encounter both.
Separately, the question of AI personhood — whether artificial intelligence systems might someday qualify as artificial persons — is an emerging doctrinal debate. That question is categorically distinct from the established doctrine of corporate personhood. Do not conflate speculative AI personhood proposals with the settled legal meaning of artificial persons as described here.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Private artificial persons: Corporations, LLCs, partnerships with legal personality, private associations recognized by law.
Public artificial persons: Municipal corporations, government agencies, public authorities, and other state-created entities endowed with legal personality to carry out governmental functions.
Ecclesiastical or charitable artificial persons: Religious corporations, charitable trusts with legal personality, and nonprofit entities — a historically significant subcategory in both common law and canon law traditions.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap is anachronism. The scope of artificial persons has expanded dramatically over time. Early common law sources treat the category as narrow and exceptional — corporations existed by royal charter or special legislative grant, and the grant of legal personality was a privilege, not a default. Modern sources reflect a world in which legal personality is routinely conferred by general incorporation statutes with minimal friction. A researcher reading Blackstone or early American treatises must account for this difference; the doctrinal weight carried by "artificial person" in 1765 is not the weight it carries today.
A second trap involves rights versus capacity. Historical sources emphasize legal capacity — the ability to act in law (contract, sue, hold property). Modern sources, particularly post-20th century American constitutional law, have extended discussion to constitutional rights held by artificial persons. These are related but distinct questions. Whether a corporation can hold property is a capacity question; whether it holds First Amendment rights is a rights question. The two threads run through different bodies of doctrine and different historical periods.
Jurisdictional variation is especially significant here. Civil law systems (French, German, Latin American) use "juridical person" and organize the concept differently, often with more explicit statutory frameworks distinguishing between persons of public law and persons of private law. Researchers crossing common law and civil law sources should treat the translation as imperfect.
Finally, the category is under active pressure from two directions: AI personhood proposals (whether intelligent systems warrant legal personality) and indigenous rights movements (whether natural features or collective entities beyond the Western corporate form can be artificial persons). These debates are in early stages and not yet settled doctrine, but they appear with increasing frequency in current legal literature.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary defines artificial persons as "persons created and devised by human laws for the purposes of society and government, as distinguished from natural persons," citing Blackstone's Commentaries at 1 Bl. Comm. 123. The definition is concise and accurate as far as it goes, and its lineage is direct: Blackstone's formulation anchored Anglo-American legal vocabulary on this point for generations.
What historical dictionaries understandably do not address is the expansion of the concept beyond corporations to encompass LLCs, government-created entities of various kinds, and the entire apparatus of modern business organization. They also do not address the constitutional dimension — the question of which constitutional protections attach to artificial persons — which became a significant doctrinal field well after Blackstone wrote.
Black's treatment reflects the classical view that legal personality is an instrument of social utility, granted by law for the purposes of society and government. This instrumental framing is worth preserving: it reminds the researcher that legal personality is a policy choice, not an ontological discovery. Courts and legislatures have always had discretion in defining what counts as an artificial person and what rights or capacities follow from that status.
Jurisdictional Note
The terminology diverges across legal systems. Common law jurisdictions use "artificial person" or "legal person" interchangeably with "corporation" in many historical sources, though modern usage is broader. Civil law jurisdictions prefer "juridical person" (personne morale in French, persona jurídica in Spanish) and typically maintain an explicit statutory distinction between public-law persons and private-law persons. Researchers working in comparative law must treat these as related but not identical frameworks.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Criminal Law Encyclopedia: Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Crimes — relevant to the unsettled question of whether AI systems might acquire artificial person status and the liability gaps that arise in the interim.
The Law Mind Intellectual Property Encyclopedia: Artificial Intelligence and Copyright — AI-Generated Works and Training Data — engages the related question of whether non-human or non-natural-person entities can hold intellectual property rights.