AMITY UNIVERSITY LUCKNOW

UTTAR PRADESH

JURISPRUDENCE

PERSONALITY

SUBMITTED TO – SUBMITTED BY-

Ms. Anupriya Yadav Amima Afsheen Khan

(Asst Professor.) BBA.LLB (4th SEMESTER)

AMITY LAW SCHOOL A8121519058

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I have taken efforts in this project. However, it would not have been possible without the kind
support and help of many individuals. I would like to extend my sincere thanks to all of them,
I am highly indebted to my professor Ms Anupriya Yadav for his/her guidance and constant
supervision as well as for providing necessary information regarding the project.
An attempt has been made to keep this current, concise and readable. However, it is human
tendency hence some mistakes would creep in spite of all care. I shall be grateful if the same
is pointed to me.
Thanks Indeed!
Amima Afsheen Khan

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 INTRODUCTION

The study of jurisprudence started with the Romans. The Latin equivalent of “jurisprudence”
is jurisprudential which means either “knowledge of law” or “skill in law”. Ulpian defines
jurisprudence as “the knowledge of things divine and human, the science of the just and
unjust”. Paulus, another Roman jurist, maintained that “the law is not to be deduced from the
rule, but the rule from the law”. The definitions given by the Roman jurist are vague and
inadequate but they put forth the idea of a legal science independent of the actual institutions
of a particular society.
In England, the word jurisprudence was in use throughout the early formative period of the
common law, but as meaning a little more than the study of or skill in law. It was not until the
time of Bentham and his disciple Austin in the early part of the 19 th century that the world
began to acquire a technical significance among the English lawyers. Bentham distinguished
between examination of the law as it is and as it ought to be. Austin occupied himself with
“expository” jurisprudence and his work consisted mainly of a formal analysis of the structure
of English Law. Analytical exposition of the type which Bentham pioneered and Austin
developed, has dominated English Legal thought up to the modern times. The word
jurisprudence has come to mean in England almost exclusively an analysis of the formal
structure of law and its concepts.
There has been a shift during the last one century and jurisprudence today is envisaged in an
immeasurably broader and more sweeping sense than that in which Austin understood it.
The word “person” is derived from the Latin word ‘persona’. To begin with, it simply meant a
mask. Later on, it was used to denote the part played by a man in life. After that, it was used in
the sense of the man who played the part. In later Roman law, the term became synonymous
with caput. A slave had an imperfect persona. Last of all, the term is used in the sense of a
being who is capable of sustaining rights and duties.
A person is not necessarily a human being. There maybe human beings who are not persons.
Slaves are not persons in the legal sense as they cannot have rights. In the same way, there
maybe persons who are not human beings, e.g., a corporation. According to Hindu Law, idols
are legal persons. Although they have a personality in the eye of the law, they are not human
beings. The term personality has a wider significance than humanity. Under the Indian Penal
Code, the word person includes any company or association, or body of persons, whether
incorporated or not.
According to Salmond: “A person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights and
duties. Any being that is so capable is a person, whether a human being or not and no being
that is not so capable is a person, even though, he be a man. Persons are the substances of
which rights and duties are the attributes. It is only in this respect that persons possess juridical
significance and this is the exclusive point of view from which personality receives legal
recognition.”

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 KINDS OF PERSONS

Two kinds of persons are recognized by law and those are natural person and legal persons.
Legal persons are also known as artificial, juristic or fictitious persons.
A natural person, according to Holland, is “such a human being as is regarded by the law as
capable of rights and duties – in the language of Roman Law, as having a status.” The first
requisite of a normal human being is that he must be recognized as possessing a sufficient
status to enable him to possess rights and duties. A slave in Roman Law did not possess a
personality sufficient to sustain legal rights and duties. In spite of that, he existed in law because
he could make contracts which under certain circumstances were binding on his master. Certain
natural rights possessed by him could have legal consequences if he was manumitted. Likewise,
in Roman Law, an exile or a captive imprisoned by the enemy forfeited his rights. However, if
he was pardoned or freed, his personality returned to him. In the case of English Law, if a
person became an outlaw, he lost his personality and thereby became incapable of having rights
and duties. The second requisite of a normal human being is that he must be born alive.
Moreover, he must possess essentially human characteristics.
1. A natural person is a human being and is a real and living person.
2. He has characteristics of the power of thought speech and choice.
3. Unborn, dead man and lower animals are not considered as natural persons.
4. The layman does not recognize idiot, company, corporation, idol etc. as persons.
5. He is also a legal person and accordingly perform their functions.
6. Natural person can live for a limited period. i.e., he cannot live more than 100 years.

Legal personality is an artificial creation of law. Entities under the law are capable of being parties
to a legal relationship. A natural person is a human being and legal persons are artificial persons,
such as a corporation. Law creates such corporation and gives certain legal rights and duties of a
human being.

A legal personality is what provides a person or organization rights and responsibilities by the
law. Usually, we automatically assume that Humans have a legal personality. This is so as such
legal systems are built for the use of human beings. These days, the concept of legal personality
is frequently a part of discussions about the rights or legal responsibility of the entities such as
corporations that cannot be defined by a single person.

There are two essentials of a legal person such as corpus and the animus.

The corpus is the body into which the law infuses the animus on the other hand animus is the
personality or the will of the person.

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 THEORIES OF JURISTIC PERSONALITY OR CORPORATE PERSONALITY

Ethical Natural law philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries as well as the metaphysical
theorists of 19th century postulated the concept of will as an essential requirement for exercising
legal right. They also believed that personality is the subjective possibility of a rightful will.

Legal personality is an artificial creation of law. Entities recognized by law are capable of being
parties to a legal relationship. A natural person is a human being whereas legal persons are
artificial persons, such as a corporation, created by law and given certain legal rights and duties
of a human being; a being, real or imaginary, who for the purpose of legal reasoning is treated
more or less as a human being. All legal persons can sue or be sued.

Theories of Juristic Personality

1. Fiction Theory – This theory was put forward by Von Savigny, Salmond, Coke, Blackstone,
and Holland etc. According to this theory, the personality of a corporation is different from that
of its members. Savigny regarded corporation as an exclusive creation of law having no existence
apart from its individual members who form the corporate group and whose acts are attributed to
the corporate entity. As a result of this, any change in the membership does not affect the existence
of the corporation.

It is essential to recognize clearly the element of legal fiction involved in this process. A company
is in law something different from its shareholders or members. The property of the company is
not in law the property of the shareholders. The company may become insolvent, while its
members remain rich.

Gray supported this theory by saying that it is only human beings that are capable of thinking,
therefore it is by way of fiction that we attribute ‘will’ to non-human beings through human beings
who are capable of thinking and assign them legal personality.

Wolf said that there are three advantages of this theory. It is analytical, more elastic and it makes
easier to disregard juristic personality where it is desirable.

2. Concession Theory – This theory is concerned with the Sovereignty of a State. It pre-supposes
that corporation as a legal person has great importance because it is recognized by the State or the
law. According to this theory, a juristic person is merely a concession or creation of the state.

Concession Theory is often regarded an offspring of the Fiction Theory as both the theories assert
that the corporation within the state have no legal personality except as is conceded by the State.
Exponents of the fiction theory, for example, Savigny, Dicey and Salmond are found to support
this theory.

Nonetheless, it is obvious that while the fiction theory is ultimately a philosophical theory that a
corporation is merely a name and a thing of the intellect, the concession theory is indifferent to
the question of the reality of a corporation in as much as it focuses only on the source (State) from
which the legal power of the corporation is derived.

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3. Group Personality Theory or Realist Sociological Theory – This theory was propounded by
Johannes Althusius and carried forward by Otto Van Gierke. This group of theorists believed that
every collective group has a real mind, a real will and a real power of action. A corporation
therefore, has a real existence, irrespective of the fact whether it is recognized by the State or not.

Gierke believed that the existence of a corporation is real and not based on any fiction. It is a
psychological reality and not a physical reality. He further said that law has no power to create an
entity but merely has the right to recognize or not to recognize an entity. A corporation from the
realist perspective is a social organism while a human is regarded as a physical organism. This
theory was favoured more by the sociologists rather than by the lawyers.

While discussing the realism of the corporate personality, most of the realist jurists claimed that
the fiction theory failed to identify the relationship of law with the society in general. The main
defect of the fiction theory according to the realist jurists was the ignorance of sociological facts
that evolved around the law-making process.

Horace Gray, however, denied the existence of collective will. He called it a figment. He said that
to get rid of the fiction of an attributed by saying that corporation has a real general will, is to
derive out one fiction by another.

4. The Bracket Theory or the Symbolist Theory – This theory was propounded by Rudolph
Ritter von Jhering (also Ihering). According to Ihering, the conception of corporate personality is
essential and is merely an economic device by which we can simplify the task of coordinating
legal relations. Hence, when necessary, it is emphasized that the law should look behind the entity
to discover the real state of affairs. This is also similar to the concept of lifting of the corporate
veil.

This group believed that the juristic personality is only a symbol to facilitate the working of the
corporate bodies. Only the members of the corporation are ‘persons’ in real sense of the term and
a bracket is put around them to indicate that they are to be treated as one single unit when they
form themselves into a corporation.

5. Purpose Theory or the theory of Zweck Vermogen - The advocates of this theory are Ernst
Immanuel Bekker and Alois von Brinz. This theory is also quite similar to the fiction theory. It
declared that only human beings can be a person and have rights. This theory also said that a
juristic person is no person at all but merely a “subjectless” property destined for a particular
purpose. There is ownership but no owner. Thus a juristic person is not constructed round a group
of persons but based on an object and purpose.

The assumption that only living persons can be the subject-matter of rights and duties would have
deprived imposition of rights and duties on corporations which are non-living entities. It therefore,
became necessary to attribute ‘personality’ to corporations for the purpose of being capable of
having rights and duties.

6. Hohfeld’s Theory- He said that juristic persons are creations of arbitrary rules of procedure.
According to him, human beings alone are capable of having rights and duties and any group to
which the law ascribes juristic personality is merely a procedure for working out the legal rights
and jural relations and making them as human beings.

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7. Kelsen’s Theory of Legal Personality – He said that there is no difference between legal
personality of a company and that of an individual. Personality in the legal sense is only a technical
personification of a complex of norms and assigning complexes of rights and duties.

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 LEGAL STATUS OF UNBORN PERSON

A child in mother’s womb is by legal fiction regarded as already born. If he is born alive, he will
have a legal status. Though law normally takes cognizance of living human beings yet the law
makes an exception in case of an infant in ventre sa mere.

Under English Law, a child in the womb of the mother is treated as in existence and property can
be vested in its name. The French Civil Code permits the transfer of property in favour of an
unborn person. But, according to Mohammedan Law a gift to a person not in existence is void. A
child in the womb of the mother is considered to be a person both under the law of crimes and law
of torts.

Indian Position –

Under section 13 of the Transfer of Property Act, property can be transferred for the benefit of an
unborn person by way of trust. Similarly, section 114 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 provides
for the creation of prior interest before the unborn person may be made the owner of property –
corporeal or incorporeal, but no property will be deemed to be vested in the unborn person unless
and until he is born alive. In Hindu Law also a child in the womb of the mother is deemed to be
in existence for certain purposes. Under Mitakshara law, such a child has interest in coparcenary
property.

Under section 315 of the Indian Penal Code, the infliction of pre-natal injury on a child, which is
capable of being born alive and which prevents it from being so could amount to an offence of
child destruction. Section 416 of Criminal Procedure Code provides that if a woman sentenced to
death is found to be pregnant, the High Court shall order the execution of the sentence to be
postponed, and may if it thinks fit, commute the sentence to imprisonment for life. It has been
held that in a Canadian case that a child could succeed in tort after it was born on account of a
deformity which was held to have been caused by a negligent pre-natal injury to mother.

Though there is no Indian case on this point but it is expected that a liberal view would be taken
on this line and a child would be getting the right to sue. In an African case it was held that a child
can succeed in tort after it is born on account of a deformity caused by pre injury to his mother.

In India as well in England, under the law of tort an infant cannot maintain an action for injuries
sustained while on ventre sa mere. However, in England damages can be recovered under Fatal
Accidents Act, 1846 for the benefit of a posthumous child. In short, it can be concluded that an
unborn person is endowed with legal personality for certain purposes.

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 LEGAL STATUS OF DEAD MAN

Dead man is not a legal person. As soon as a man dies, he ceases to have a legal personality. Dead
men do not remain as bearers of rights and duties it is said that they have laid down their rights
and duties with their death. Action personalis moritur cum persona- action dies with the death of
a man.

With death personality comes to an end. A dead man ceases to have any legal right or bound by
any legal duty. Yet, law to some extent, recognises and takes account of the desires or intentions
of a deceased person. Law ensures a decent burial, it respects the wishes of the deceased regarding
the disposal of his property, protects his reputation and in some cases continues pending action
instituted by or against a person who is now deceased.

Indian Position –

As far as a dead man’s body is concerned criminal law secures a decent burial to all dead men.
Section 297 of Indian Penal Code also provides punishment for committing crime which amounts
to indignity to any human corpse. The criminal law provides that any imputation against a
deceased person, if it harms the reputation of that person if living and is intended to hurt the feeling
of his family or other near relatives, shall be offence of defamation under sec 499 of the Indian
Penal Code.

The Supreme Court in the case of Ashray Adhikar Abhiyan v Union of India has held that even a
homeless person when found dead on the road, has a right of a decent burial or cremation as per
his religious faith.

In English Law as well as in Muslim Law the violation of a grave is a criminal offence. As regards
reputation of a dead man, it is to some extent protected by criminal law. Under Roman law any
insult to the body of the deceased at the timing of funeral, gave the deceased’s heir a right to sue
for the injury as it is treated as insult to the heir. Under the law of France, the relative of the
defamed deceased can successfully sue for damages, if they can prove that some injury it suited
from the defamation. Thus, it is not the rights and the hence the personality of the deceased that
the law recognises and protects but it is the right and interest of living descendants that it is
protected.

So far trust is concerned English Law provides the rule that permanent trust for the maintenance
of a dead man’s tomb is illegal and void and property cannot be tied up for this purpose. This rule
has been laid down in the leading case of Williams v. Williams where it was said that a corpse is
the property of no one. It cannot be disposed of by will or any other instrument. It was further held
in this case that even temporary trusts are neither valid nor enforceable. Its fulfilment is lawful
and not obligatory.

It was held in Mathii Khan v. Veda Leiwai that worship at the tomb of a person is charitable and
religious purposes amongst Muslims- hence trust is possible.

In Saraswati v. Raja Gopal it was held that worship at the Samadhi of a person, except in a
community in which there is a widespread practice of raising tombs and worshipping there at, is

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not a religious or charitable purpose according to Hindu Law and would not constitute a valid trust
or endowment.

Regarding the property of the dead man the law carries out the wishes of the deceased example, a
will made by him regarding the disposal of his property. This is done to protect the interest of
those who are living and who would get the benefit under the will. This is subject to the rule
against perpetuity as well as law of testamentary succession. Indian Transfer of Property Act,
section 14 incorporates the rule against perpetuities, which forbids transfer of property for an
indefinite time thereby making it alienable. Section 14 of the TPA restrains the power of creating
future interests by providing in the rule against perpetuities that such interest must arise within
certain limits. The rule of perpetuity looks to the date at which the contingent interest will vest, if
it vests at all, and hold it to be void as “perpetuity if this date is too remote”.

Similarly, section 1 and 4 of the Indian Succession Act, 1925 forbids the creation of a will whereby
vesting of property is postponed beyond the lifetime of one or more persons and the minority
period of the unborn person.

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 LEGAL STATUS OF LOWER ANIMALS

Law does not recognise beasts or lower animals as persons because they are merely things and
have no natural or legal rights. Salmond regards them mere objects of legal rights and duties
but never subjects of them. Animals are not capable of having rights and duties and hence they
are not legal persons.

Ancient Law - However, in ancient times animals were regarded as having legal rights and
being bound by legal duties. Under the ancient Jewish Code ‘if an ox gore (wound with a horn)
a man or woman resulting in his or her death, then the ox was to be stoned and its flesh was
not to be eaten. There are many examples in ancient Hebrew Codes where cock, bulls, dogs
and even the trunk of trees which had fallen on human beings and killed him were tried for
homicide.’ There are similar instances in India as well. In number of cases found that, animals
were sued in courts in ancient India. There is popular story about the Mughal Emperor Jehangir
in which the bullock was presented before the Emperor. However, these instances are merely
of historical interest and have no relevance in modern law.

Modern Law - Modern Law does not recognise animals as bearer of rights and duties. Law is
made for human beings and all things including animals are for men. No animal can be the
owner of property from a person to an animal. Animals are merely the object of transfer and
are a kind of property which are owned and possessed by persons. Of course, for the wrongs
done by animals the master is held liable. This duty or liability of the master arises due to public
policy and public expediency. The liability of the master is strict and not a vicarious liability.
The animal could be said to have a legal personality only if the liability of the master is
considered vicarious.

In certain cases, the law assumes the liability of the master for an animal as direct while in
other cases, liability is not direct. Thus, for keeping animals that are not of dangerous nature
the master is not liable for the damage it may do, unless he knows that it was dangerous. The
knowledge of the defendant must be shown as to their propensity to do the act in question.
However, if the animal is of ferocious nature, the master is responsible for the wrong if he
shows negligence in handling it. The owner of animals of this class is also responsible for their
trespasses and consequent damage. If a man’s cattle, sheep or poultry, stray into his neighbour’s
land or garden, and do such damage as might ordinarily be expected to be done by things of
that sort, the owner is liable to his neighbour for the consequences. A charitable trust can be
created for the maintenance of stray cattle, broken horses and other animals. Such a trust is
created with a view to promote public welfare and advancement of religion. However, if the
charitable trust is created only for the benefit of a single horse or a dog, it cannot be regarded
as public charitable trust for instance in Re Dean Cooper Dean v. Stevens a test of charged his
property with the payment of annual sum of trustees for the maintenance of his horses and
dogs. The court held that it is not valid trust enforceable in any way on behalf of these animals.
It was observed that the trustee could/spend the money if they pleased in the manner desired
by the testator. But if they did not spend the money it would not be considered a breach of trust
and in such a situation the money so spent will be of the representatives of the testator.

Similarly, a bequest for the maintenance of the testator’s favourite black mare a bequest of an
annual sum for the maintenance of testator’s horses and hounds for a period of 50 years if nay

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those animals should so long live a trust for the benefit of a parrot during the life of two trustees
and survivor of them have all been held valid.

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 LEGAL STATUS OF AN ARTIFICIAL PERSON/ CORPORATE LEGAL
PERSONALITY

Legal personality is a fictitious attribution of personality by law, a sort of personification of

law. Legal persons being artificial creations of law can be of as many kinds as the law devises.
Continental jurisprudence recognizes three kinds of legal persons, namely

(i) Groups or series of men, usually called corporations: The first class of legal
persons consists of corporations, namely those which are constitutes by the
personification of groups (e.g., corporation aggregate) or series of individuals (e.g.,
corporation sole). In State Trading Corporation of India v. Commercial Tax Officer,
the Court observed that corporation are undoubtedly legal persons but is not a
citizen within the meaning of Article 19 of the Constitution and cannot ask for the
enforcement of fundamental rights granted to citizens under the said article.

(ii) Institutions like hospitals, libraries etc.: The second class is that in which
corporations or object selected for personification not a group of series of persons
but an institution is. The law may, if it pleases, regard a church, a hospital or a
university or a library as a person. That is to say it may attribute personality not to
any group of persons connected with the institution, but to the institution itself. In
the tradition and practice of English Law, legal personality is not limited by any
logical necessity or indeed by any obvious requirement of expediency to the
incorporated bodies of individual persons. In India, institutions like university,
temple, public authorities, etc. are considered as legal persons. Under Indian law,
trade unions and friendly societies are legal entities. They own properties and suits
can be brought in their names though not regarded as corporations.

(iii) Funds or estates like the estates of deceased persons: The third kind of legal
person is that in which the corpus is some fund or estate devoted to special uses, a
charitable fund for example, or a trust estate, or the property or a dead man or of a
bankrupt.

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 CORPORATE SOLE

Corporation sole is a legal entity consisting of a sole incorporated office, occupied by a single
man/woman and it has legal continuity.

A corporation sole consists of one person only, and the successors of that person in some
particular station or office. The King of England is a corporation sole; so is a bishop; and in
the Church of England every parson and vicar is, in view of the law, a corporation sole.

To understand the concept of corporation sole one needs to deal with two yet similar questions:
First, it was necessary to discover what application the concept had, which involved
understanding why it had come into being in the first place; but Second, it was necessary to
ask what forms of law the use of this concept had excluded. Law, in ruling some things in, is
always ruling some things out (though it was by implication the English genius to stretch the
terms of this proposition as far as they would go). Even English law could not conjure up terms
of art that were adaptable. That the corporation sole was a term of art contrived to meet a
particular practical problem rather than deduced from a set of general juristic precepts, could
not be doubted. Nor could it be doubted that the application of this contrivance was rather
limited. But what was surprising was how much, nonetheless, was ruled in, and how much
ruled out.

The origins of the corporation sole Maitland traced to a particular era and a particular problem.
The era was the sixteenth century, and coincides with what Maitland calls ‘a disintegrating
process . . . within the ecclesiastical groups’, when enduring corporate entities (corporations
‘aggregate’, which were, notwithstanding the misleading terminology, more than the sum of
their parts) were fracturing under political, social and legal pressure. However, the particular
problem was not one of groups but of individuals; or rather, it was a problem of one individual,
the parish parson, and of one thing, the parish church. Was this thing, a church, plausibly either
the subject or the object of property rights? The second question – of objectivity – was the more
pressing one, as it concerned something that was unavoidable as a cause of legal dispute,
namely ‘an exploitable and enjoyable mass of wealth’.

But it could not be addressed without considering the other question, and the possibility that
the ownership of this wealth does not attach to any named individuals but to the church itself.
The law could probably have coped with this outcome, but the named individuals involved,
including not only the parson but also the patron who nominates him and the bishop who
appoints him, could not. It placed exploitation and enjoyment at too great a remove. Instead,
an idea that had been creeping towards the light during the fifteenth century was finally pressed
into service, and the parson was deemed the owner, not in his own right, but as a kind of
corporation, called a ‘corporation sole’.

What this meant, in practice, was that the parson could enjoy and exploit what wealth there
was but could not alienate it. But what it meant in theory was that the church belonged to
something that was both more than the parson but somewhat less than a true corporation. That
it was more than the parson was shown by the fact that full ownership, to do with as he pleased,
did not belong to any one parson at any given time; that it was less than a corporation was
shown by the fact that when the parson died, ownership did not reside in anybody or anything
else, but went into abeyance. Essentially, the corporation sole was a negative idea. It placed

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ultimate ownership beyond anyone. It was a ‘subject less right, a fee simple in the clouds. It
was, in short, an absurdity, which served the practical purpose of many absurdities by standing
in for an answer to a question for which no satisfactory answer was forthcoming.

The idea of the corporation sole gave legal fictions a bad name; the corporation sole was a
frivolous idea, which implied that the personification of things other than natural persons was
somehow a less than serious matter. It was not so much that absurdity bred absurdity, but that
it accustoms us to absurdity, and all that that entails. Finally, however, the idea of the
corporation sole was serious because it encouraged something less than seriousness about
another office than parson. Although the class of corporation’s sole was slow to spread, it was
found serviceable by lawyers in describing at least one other person, or type of person: The
Crown. To think of the Crown as a corporation sole, whose personality is neither equivalent to
the actual person of the king nor detachable from it, is ‘clumsy’. It is in some ways less clumsy
than the use of the concept in application to a parson. The central difficulty, that of ‘abeyance’
when one holder of the office dies, is unlikely to arise in this case: when a parson dies there
may be some delay before another is appointed, but when a king dies there is considerable
incentive to allow no delay, whatever the legal niceties. Nor is it necessarily clumsier than
other, more famous doctrines: it is no more ridiculous to make two persons of one body than it
is to make two bodies of one person It makes a ‘mess’ of the idea of the civil service by allowing
it to be confused with ‘personal’ service of the king; it cannot cope with the idea of a national
debt; it even introduces confusion into the postal service (by encouraging the view that the
Postmaster-General is somehow freeholder of countless post offices). It also gets things out of
proportion, for just as it implies that a single man is owner of what rightly belongs to the state,
so it also suggests that affairs of state encompass personal pastimes.

The problem with absurd legal constructions is not simply that serious concerns may be
trivialised, but also that trivial matters may be taken too seriously, which is just as time-
consuming. ‘So long as the State is not seen to be a person [in its own right], we must either
make an unwarrantably free use of the King’s name, or we must be forever stopping holes
through which a criminal might glide.’ Therefore, a corporation sole can be defined as a
corporation sole consists of one person and his or her successors in some particular office or
station, who are incorporated by law in order to give them certain legal capacities and
advantages which they would not have in their natural person.

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 CORPORATE AGGREGATE

A corporate aggregate is an incorporated group of co-existing persons. Examples: all private

limited companies, all public limited companies, multi-national corporations, public
undertaking corporations. “Corporate aggregate” is a fictitious body and created by the policy
of men. They may also be called as “body’s Politique”. A corporate aggregate has several
members at a time. These are the private offices. The primary object of corporate aggregate is
to do business. It is lesser permanent than corporate sole. Similarly, corporate aggregate also
shall have its own properties, debts, with which the shareholders are not concerned. The
shareholders are concerned corporation / company subject to the extent of their share amount,
not exceeding that. They have their own properties. The debts of the company are not having
any connection with their own properties. The debts, profits, losses are related to the share
amount only.

So, the perfect definition of corporate aggregate would be –

Corporation aggregate consist of two or more persons united in a society, which is preserved
by a succession of members, either forever or till the corporation is dissolved by the power that
formed it, by the death of all its members, by surrender of its charter or franchises, or by
forfeiture. Such corporations are the mayor and aldermen of cities, the head and fellows of a
college, the dean and chapter of a cathedral church, the stockholders of a bank or insurance
company, etc.

A corporation aggregate, or body politic, or body incorporate, is a collection of many;

individuals united in one body, under a special denomination, having perpetual succession
under an artificial form, and vested by the policy of the law, with a capacity of acting in several
respects as an individual, particularly of taking and granting property, contracting obligations,
and of suing and being sued; of enjoying privileges and immunities in common, and of
exercising a variety of political rights, more or less extensive, according to the design of its
institution, or the powers conferred upon it, either at the time of its creation, or at any
subsequent period of its existence.

So basically, a corporate aggregate consists of several persons, who are' united in one society,
which is continued by a succession of members. Of this kind are the mayor or commonalty of
a city; the heads and fellows of a college; the members of trading companies, and the like.
Going by the above description of corporation’s aggregate, it would logically follow that every
form of concerted activity of willing individuals aimed at a particular end, would lead to their
acts coming to known through the glass of incorporation which realises their combined
operations as one single act, performed by a single personality. However, it is in this regard
that the real limits of artificial personality are discernible. The law deems only certain forms
of concerted action as eligible for recognition through incorporation; thus, while joint stock
companies are recognised as incorporated bodies, associations such as partnerships, trade
unions and other organizations are not recognised as incorporated bodies for various reasons.
These groups have come to assume the term ‘unincorporated associations.

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