The Concept of Juristic Person

Abstract

The monograph aims to explain the concept of juristic person. It therefore first deals with the question of what it means to be a person under the law and how such a person should be approached in methodological terms. A question follows what the difference is between the concept of a person in civil law and in the Anglo-American (common-law) system. Since a human being and a person are not one and the same concept, the process of getting to know (or studying) a human being cannot be confused with analysing a "person". To learn about a person, one has to analyse the legal order in which the person exists in normative terms, i.e. is valid. Based on analysis of the applicable (positive) law, it can be concluded that a person represents a "point of imputation". If we look at a person as a point of imputation, we will have to face the question of what should be imputed to a person and why. The fact itself that a person represents a point of imputation clarifies in no way whether and why legal personhood should be granted to a juristic person and, on the same note, what legal consequences this will have. Providing an answer to these questions was the objective of various theories of juristic persons, where the most important were the following: the theory of legal fiction; the organic theory; the theory of interest; and the combined theory of juristic persons. These theories are still the subject of discourse, and we need to consider not only their historical significance, but primarily the importance they may carry at the present time. Attempts to provide a theoretical explanation for a juristic person were also closely linked to the views of pure theory of law, as well as postmodern legal concepts. The last group of mutually interconnected issues pertain to the substance of personhood vested in a juristic person, the substance of its legal capacity and the substance of juristic person's liability for a wrong. The answers to all these questions then make it possible to distinguish a juristic person from a mere legal entity, and thus lay down the defining elements of a juristic person.