Definition
In law, a "person" is any entity recognized as capable of holding rights and bearing legal duties. This is the foundational distinction between a legal person and a mere thing: a thing is the object over which rights are exercised; a person is the subject who holds or owes them.
1. Natural person. A living human being. Every human being is a natural person in modern law, though historical legal systems imposed significant qualifications — slaves, for example, were treated as things rather than persons in antebellum American law, and married women labored under severe legal disabilities under coverture.
2. Artificial person (legal person). An entity created or recognized by law as having legal personality distinct from the individuals who compose it. Corporations are the primary example, but the category extends to governmental bodies, partnerships in some jurisdictions, certain trusts, ships (in admiralty), and — increasingly — other organized entities. An artificial person can sue and be sued, hold property, and enter contracts in its own name.
The operative insight is that "person" in legal usage is not a biological category but a legal status — one that can be conferred, qualified, or withheld by law.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): An individual who has been granted personhood; usually a human being.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): A character or part, as in a play; a specific kind or manifestation of individual character, whether in real life or in literary representation; an assumed character. [Archaic]
The gap matters in two directions. First, ordinary usage assumes personhood tracks humanity: every human is a person and vice versa. Legal usage breaks both halves of that equation — some humans have historically been denied legal personhood, and non-humans routinely possess it. Second, Webster's 1913 preserves an older sense of "person" as a role or mask (the Latin persona), which surfaces in legal contexts like "capacity" and "office" — a judge acts in the person of the court, not in her private person.
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Common Confusion
PERSON vs. INDIVIDUAL: Statutes and regulations often use "individual" to mean specifically a natural human being, reserving "person" for the broader category that includes artificial entities. When a statute extends rights or duties to "persons," check the definitions section: the term may or may not sweep in corporations, depending on legislative intent and interpretive context. This distinction is especially live in constitutional law, privacy statutes, and civil rights legislation.
PERSON vs. PARTY: A person becomes a party only upon entering litigation or a transaction. All parties are persons; not all persons are parties to any given matter.
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Core Elements
Legal personhood, whether natural or artificial, generally requires three attributes in legal analysis:
1. Capacity to hold rights. The entity can be the beneficiary of legal protections — to own property, to sue, to invoke constitutional guarantees.
2. Capacity to bear duties. The entity can be legally obligated, bound by contract, subject to judgment, and held liable.
3. Legal recognition. The status is conferred or acknowledged by the legal system. For natural persons, this is typically automatic and coextensive with birth (with ongoing debates about prenatal and posthumous personhood). For artificial persons, it requires affirmative legal act — incorporation, charter, statute.
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Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
Natural person: A human being. The default and oldest category.
Artificial person / Legal person / Juristic person: An entity other than a human being that law treats as a person. Includes corporations, municipal bodies, and certain other organized entities.
Quasi-person / Quasi-corporation: Entities that possess some but not all attributes of full legal personhood. Bouvier's specifically notes quasi-corporations in this spectrum. The category is context-dependent and historically imprecise.
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Why It Matters in Research
The instability of "person" across time and jurisdiction is one of the most consequential traps in legal research.
Historical sources encode exclusions modern law has repudiated. When Bouvier's, Black's, and Burrill's define a natural person as "a man considered according to the rank he holds in society," they are not using "man" generically — they are reflecting a legal order that graded personhood by status, sex, race, and condition of servitude. Researchers reading 19th-century sources must treat any statement about the scope of natural personhood as historically situated, not universally descriptive.
Statutory definitions govern. In regulatory and statutory research, never assume the ordinary meaning of "person" applies. Modern federal and state codes almost always define the term in a definitions section, and those definitions vary dramatically — "person" may include or exclude partnerships, trusts, governmental entities, Indian tribes, and estates depending on the statute. The same word in the same code can mean different things in different titles.
Constitutional personhood is contested terrain. Whether corporations are "persons" for purposes of the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments has generated substantial litigation and remains an active area of legal development. Historical dictionary sources predate much of this development and offer limited guidance on its current state.
Artificial personhood is a spectrum, not a binary. Burrill's and Rapalje & Lawrence both gesture toward the complexity: some entities have fuller legal personality than others. Researchers tracing the legal status of a particular entity — a trust, a foreign corporation, an unincorporated association — should not assume the category resolves the question.
International and comparative variation is significant. Civil law systems (French, German, Spanish) have their own vocabularies for legal personality that do not map precisely onto common law categories. Sources translated from civilian traditions may use "person" in subtly different ways.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The five historical dictionaries converge on the natural/artificial distinction as the structural core of the term, and all trace the concept back to the person-as-subject-of-rights framework. Bouvier's, Black's (both editions), and Burrill's are in close agreement, with Bouvier's offering the most expansive treatment by acknowledging quasi-corporations and citing case law extending personhood to non-human entities. Burrill's is the most philosophically precise, emphasizing the person/thing (persona/res) distinction drawn from Roman law.
Rapalje & Lawrence's treatment is notable for its direct engagement with the theoretical question: "a person is the object of rights and duties" (using "object" in the philosophical sense of subject-matter, not the sense of thing subordinated to another). The cross-reference to MONSTER in that entry reflects a historical preoccupation with the edges of natural personhood that modern law has largely resolved by statute and constitutional principle.
What the historical sources collectively miss or understate: the contingency of personhood for human beings under systems of slavery and coverture; the emerging complexity of corporate constitutional rights; and any notion of personhood beyond the natural/artificial binary (such as debates over animals, AI systems, or ecosystems, which are live in contemporary comparative law).
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Jurisdictional Note
In the United States, statutory definitions of "person" vary by federal and state code, and courts routinely apply a presumption — sometimes codified in general definitions acts — that "person" includes corporations unless context indicates otherwise. In international law and some civil law jurisdictions, the concept of "legal person" (personne morale / juristische Person) carries distinct doctrinal content that does not translate directly into common law analysis.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Torts & Personal Injury Encyclopedia: Intentional Torts — Persons — Defense of Property (Real and Personal)
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