Legal Interpretations from Ayodhya Verdict Part 4

 

Jay Shree Ram!

These are some notes from Ayodhya Verdict regarding legal interpretations of certain statutory provisions:

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Part 1

Part 2

Part 3


The power of legal systems to recognise and hence also to deny legal personality has been used over history to wreak fundamental breaches of human rights.

Legal systems across the world evolved from periods of darkness where legal personality was denied to natural persons to the present day where in constitutional democracies almost all natural persons are also legal persons in the eyes of the law. Legal systems have also extended the concept of legal personality beyond natural persons. This has taken place through the creation of the “artificial legal person” or “juristic person”, where an object or thing which is not a natural person is nonetheless recognised as a legal person in the law.

Persons are the substance 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. – Salmond

But we may go one step further than this in the analysis. No being is capable of rights, unless also capable of interests which may be affected by the acts of others. For every right involves an underlying interest of this nature. Similarly no being is capable of duties, unless also capable of acts by which the interests of others may be affected. To attribute rights and duties, therefore, is to attribute interests and acts as their necessary bases. A person, then, may be defined for the purposes of the law, as any being to whom the law attributes a capability of interests and therefore of rights, of acts and therefore of duties. – Salmond

Such a person has to this extent a real existence, and it is his personality alone that is fictitious. Attribute the quality of personality to a purely imaginary being, and yet attain the ends for which this fictitious extension of personality is devised. Personification, however, conduces so greatly to simplicity of thought and speech, that its aid is invariably accepted. The thing personified may be termed the corpus of the legal person so created; it is the body into which the law infuses the animus of a fictitious personality. – Salmond


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