ABSTRACT
In books of the Law, as in other books, and in common speech, 'person' is often used as meaning a human being, but the technical legal meaning of a 'person' is a subject of legal rights and duties. Included in human beings, normal and abnormal, are all living beings having a human form. In several systems of Law, supernatural beings have been recognized as legal persons. The persons calling upon the State for the enforcement of the statutes are regarded by the Law as exercising their own wills, or the will of the State or of some other organized body of human beings. Fictions of the dogmatic kind are compatible with the most refined and most highly developed systems of Law. In modern Jurisprudence, animals have no legal duties, but in early stages of the Law, they seem to have been regarded for some purposes as having legal duties, for a breach of which they were liable to be punished.
