CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 82Legal principles and applicationsCorporate Governance and LawLegal Rights and Human Rights

Legal Personality

Open access
Smith, Bryant·1928·The Yale Law Journal
DOI 10.2307/789740
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

To be a legal person is to be the subject of rights and duties.To confer legal rights or to impose legal duties, therefore, is to confer legal personality.2If society by effective sanctions and through its agents will coerce A to act or to forbear in favor of B, B has a right and A owes a duty.3 Predictability of societal action, therefore, determines rights and duties and rights and duties determine legal personality.Whatever the controversies about the "essential nature" of legal personality, there seems to be a uniform concurrence in these as respectively the test of its existence in a given subject, and the manner in which it is conferred, whether upon a natural person or upon an inanimate thing.Among definitions to be found in discussions of the subject, perhaps the most satisfactory is that legal personality is the capacity for legal relations.-Butthere is, nevertheless, an objection to the word "capacity" which seems of some importance.It suggests the possibility that the subject may have a capacity for legal relations without yet having become a party to such relations.A minor with capacity to marry is not necessarily married, whereas, when legal personality is conferred, the sub-IThis paper was read before the Round Table on Business Associations at the meeting of the Association of American Law Schools at Chicago in December, 1926.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.2307/789740

Cites

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Smith a proposé la théorie des intérêts à protéger : la personnalité est reconnue lorsqu'il y a besoin qu'une entité bénéficie d'une protection juridique.

    “Smith (1928, p. 284) a, quant à lui, proposé la théorie des intérêts à protéger : la personnalité est reconnue lorsqu'il y a besoin qu'une entité bénéficie d'une protection juridique.”

    From L’agentivité algorithmique, fiction futuriste ou impératif de justice procédurale ? (2022) · cites this paper as Smith (1928, p. 284)

    In the opening section (page unavailable), Smith attributes the idea that rights require interests to Salmond, rather than proposing it as his own theory. Later, in the section labelled “CPTIONS (1923) 30.” (page unavailable), he says legal personality serves society’s purposes by regulating human conduct, not that it is recognized when an entity needs legal protection. (LLM, conf=0.86)

    Checked by a reasoning model — may be wrong.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Still being checked.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Smith, B.
Corresponding author
Smith, Bryant
Venue
The Yale Law Journal
Publisher
JSTOR
Published
1928-01
Volume
37
Issue
3
Pages
283
ISSN
0044-0094 (ISSN-L)
DOI
10.2307/789740
OpenAlex
W4247040722
Cited by
82
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 4 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 16 · 2018: 5 · 2017: 3 · 2016: 2 · 2012: 1
FWCI
0.00
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • The Yale Law Journal (publishedVersion)
  • bepress Legal Repository (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Law › Legal principles and applications
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Strategy and Management › Corporate Governance and Law
  • Social Sciences › Law › Legal Rights and Human Rights
Keywords
legal personality, legal rights and obligations, natural persons, artificial persons

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review