THE PERSON AT LAW FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF PURE LEGAL SCIENCE

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Karel Beran

Abstract

The person as a legal term is traditionally derived from a human being, either from an individual or a group of people. Hans Kelsen maintains that no such substance really exists. “The person exists only insofaras he “has” duties and rights; apart from them the person has no existence whatsoever.” This is why a human being is construed as an abstract holder of subjective rights rather than the person in a legal sense. This conception results in the normative construction of a person. The person is considered to be a mere point, an ideal and never real fact. Kelsen designates this point as “personification of the set of norms” regulating the conduct of a human being. However, such an entity as the personification of legal norms does not exist in the outer, real world. The legal order may attach legal personality to any segment of the outer world, even to an imagination of something non-existent in the outer world. The relationship between this abstract point and the addressee of duties is called “assignability”. This is why the person in a legal sense is, in the normativist perspective, considered to be “a point of assignability”. The aim of this article is to describe the approach of pure legal science to a person as a personified set of legal norms or as a point of assignability.

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