Law is the way of ordering human relations within a society. For there to be harmony and respect for rules among the individuals who are part of a community, it is necessary to develop rules that organize coexistence. The Law develops various regulations, codes and areas of application (civil code, penal code, administrative law, commercial ...). One of the key elements is the basic principles of law, that is, those general ideas from which laws are developed: equality, freedom or justice. From these principles, the concepts of law begin to be specified; there are general, imperative, coercive concepts, etc. Legal personality is one of the basic concepts of the law.
The fundamental idea of legal personality consists in recognizing that someone (a person) or an entity (company, association or foundation) has rights and obligations. In other words, the legal personality attributes the ownership of duties and obligations insofar as the holder of them has them by the simple fact of existing and without their acceptance being necessary. By having the ownership of rights and obligations, the person or entity can already act legally.
Each nation has its own definition of legal personality, although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 6, explains the formal recognition of the notion of legal personality in a general sense. The fact that a person or entity has a recognized legal personality implies that the law protects and protects it, allowing it to fully exercise all its legal capacity. Legal personality is considered to be a conquest of the law, since there have been and are cases in which such recognition does not exist: slavery in the past and women in some countries today.
Taking the Civil Code of Spanish legislation as a reference, the idea of natural persons and legal persons is distinguished. The idea of a natural person is based on his birth and disappears at the moment of death. Person or legal personality is established when it is formalized as such. A concrete example would be the case of an association, which would have legal personality when its statutes are approved. Based on the administrative and legal recognition of the statutes, an association already has a legal personality and can act legally.
