Bilchitz D (2009) Going Beyond Arbitrariness: The Legal Person and the Dignity of Nonhuman Animals. S Afr J Hum Rights 25:38-72 The concept of heritage here is very close to what I mean by a legal platform. This dual regulation of ownership resembles in many respects certain characteristics of the legal person. One of the characteristics of the legal personality of commercial companies – as opposed to, for example, partnerships – is what is known as limited liability or asset protection.26 Limited liability means that the shareholders of a commercial company are not personally liable for their debts. This is one of the reasons why a person wants to form a company to do business: the person`s personal assets are protected from the company`s creditors. The link to the above model of dual inheritance is quite clear; Scottish trusts are similar to corporations in that they offer limited liability. Article 19(3) of the Basic Law provides: „Fundamental rights shall also apply to national legal persons, so far as the nature of those rights so permits.“ [21] The concept of legal personality is not absolute. `penetration of the corporate veil` means the consideration of natural persons acting as agents involved in an act or decision of society; This may lead to a court decision treating the rights or obligations of a company or public limited company as rights or obligations of the members or directors of that company. The argument of the „personification“ of the environment from the point of view of damage calculation can best be demonstrated from the socio-economic position.

Any well-functioning legal-economic system should be structured in such a way as to confront each of us with the overall cost that our activities impose on society. [ . ] When it comes to pollution costs, unfortunately, the ideal of distribution is beginning to crumble because traditional legal institutions have a harder time „catching“ and confronting us with the full social costs of our activities. [ . ] There is no reason not to allow the lake to prove damage to [persons affected by the pollution] as a prima facie measure of the damage suffered to it. In this way, we make the natural object, through its guardian, a legal entity empowered to collect these fragmented and otherwise unrepresented claims for damages and bring them to court, even if they are not asserted by traditional class action plaintiffs for legal or practical reasons.45 Lawson points out that, At least theoretically, a business lawyer can create an unlimited number of companies, to meet the needs of a company. Lawson, however, is well aware that we are not talking here about „physical things,“ but about „abstract entities that can function as subjects and objects of legal relations“.“14 Let us first leave aside the untenable assertion that to be a legal person is to be a subject and object of legal relations; The important point here is that the incorporation of a company does not necessarily imply the transfer of legal personality to an already existing entity. On the contrary, a new institutional fact is simply emerging. This is analogous to the two ways in which money can exist, as John Searle noted.15 The most traditional type of money is silver.16 In this case, a physical object (usually a piece of metal or paper) is silver.

When a coin is melted down to make a ball, it is no longer money; Its status as money disappears, and there is less money in the world. Let`s call it physical money. Not all money exists in this form today. Most instances of money do not correspond to any particular physical object – they are autonomous, to use Searle`s term.17 This type of money exists only in the form of information that can be stored by various methods (human memory, paper, hard drives, etc.). 18 Let`s call it abstract money. I argue in this chapter that many of these „anything goes“ claims are actually based on a merger of two different meanings of „legal person“: the term is used to refer to both a set of legal positions and an entity representing these legal positions, and these different meanings are not clearly separated. This leads to problematic claims and non-balancing. After distinguishing between these two meanings (and calling one of them a „legal platform“), I will address the question of who or what a legal entity can be.