Black’s Law Dictionary defines a person as any being the law regards as capable of holding rights or owing duties. That formulation is deliberately broad. It covers living human beings, and it also covers corporations, partnerships, and other entities the legal system treats as independent actors. Everything on the other side of the line is a “thing” — an object over which rights get exercised, but with no rights of its own.
That binary matters. A legal person can own property, sign contracts, sue and be sued, and claim at least some constitutional protections. A thing cannot. Your car, your house, and your bank account sit on one side. You, the corporation that sold you the car, and the bank that holds your account sit on the other.
What the Dictionary Actually Says
Black’s Law Dictionary is the most cited legal reference in the United States, referenced more than 250 times by the U.S. Supreme Court since 2000.1Thomson Reuters. Black’s Law Dictionary The core sentence reads: “So far as legal theory is concerned, a person is any being whom the law regards as capable of rights or duties.”
That single line does a lot of work. It decouples personhood from biology and ties it to legal capacity, meaning the ability to hold rights, owe obligations, or both. Anything the law equips with that capacity is a person; anything the law does not is not. From there, the definition splits into two familiar categories: natural persons and artificial persons.
Natural Persons
A natural person is a living human being. Legal personhood for a natural person begins at birth and ends at death. Between those points, a human being holds an inherent set of rights — the right to own property, enter contracts, vote, and claim constitutional protections — that no artificial entity fully shares.
Personhood is not the same as capacity, though, and this is where readers often get tripped up. A person can be a full legal person and still lack the capacity to take certain binding legal actions.
Age is the first limit. Legal capacity to enter binding contracts generally requires reaching the age of majority, which is 18 in almost every state. Before that, a minor can sign a contract, but the contract is voidable at the minor’s option. The minor can walk away while still underage, and in most states, once they turn 18 without taking steps to cancel the agreement, it becomes binding. Contracts for true necessities like food, clothing, and shelter are the main exception; a minor generally cannot void those.
Mental capacity imposes a similar limit. A person who cannot understand the nature and consequences of a transaction — because of cognitive disability, severe illness, or intoxication — may lack the legal capacity to enter a binding agreement, even though they remain a legal person in every other respect. Personhood is permanent while you are alive. Capacity can come and go.
Artificial Persons
Artificial persons are entities that exist only because the law says they do. They have no physical body, no consciousness, and no lifespan tied to biology. The law grants them a separate identity so they can participate in commerce, hold assets, and bear responsibility independently of the humans who create or manage them.
Corporations
The corporation is the most familiar artificial person. When founders file organizational documents with a state and meet the state’s requirements, a new legal entity comes into existence. That entity can own property, borrow money, sign contracts, and sue or be sued in its own name. Its identity is separate from its shareholders, directors, and officers. If the corporation takes on debt, creditors pursue the corporation’s assets, not the personal bank accounts of the people behind it. That separation is the core practical reason corporate personhood exists. Without it, large-scale investment and commerce would be far riskier, because every shareholder would be personally on the hook for every business obligation.
Other Business Entities
Corporations are not the only artificial persons. Limited liability companies combine the liability protection of a corporation with the tax flexibility of a partnership, and they are treated as separate legal entities in their own right. Under the Uniform Partnership Act adopted in most states, even a general partnership is now recognized as a distinct legal entity that can hold property and sue in its own name, rather than a mere collection of individual partners.
What Artificial Persons Cannot Do
Artificial persons share many procedural rights with natural persons, but some rights stay exclusively human. A corporation cannot vote, hold public office, or marry. It cannot invoke the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. In the 1906 case Hale v. Henkel, the Supreme Court drew a clear line: because a corporation is a creature of the state that receives special privileges under its charter, it has no right to refuse to produce its books and records the way an individual can.2Library of Congress. Hale v. Henkel, 201 U.S. 43 (1906) The Court acknowledged that corporations do enjoy Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, but the self-incrimination privilege belongs to natural persons alone.
Corporations do, however, count as persons under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause — the Supreme Court settled that in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886.3Justia Law. Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., 118 U.S. 394 They do not count as “citizens” under the Privileges and Immunities Clause.4Legal Information Institute. 14th Amendment, U.S. Constitution Corporate personhood is a legal fiction — powerful enough to sustain modern commerce, but not a wholesale transplant of human rights onto a business entity.
How Federal Law Codifies the Definition
Black’s Law Dictionary is influential, but it is not itself the law. The federal government codified its own working definition in the Dictionary Act. Under 1 U.S.C. § 1, the words “person” and “whoever” include corporations, companies, associations, firms, partnerships, societies, and joint stock companies, in addition to individuals, unless the context of a specific statute indicates otherwise.5Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 1 U.S. Code 1 – Words Denoting Number, Gender, and so Forth
The “unless the context indicates otherwise” qualifier matters. Individual statutes can narrow or expand the definition for their own purposes. A criminal statute might define “person” to include government agents but exclude government entities themselves. A tax statute might treat trusts as persons for filing purposes. The Dictionary Act provides the default, and specific statutes override it when they need to. This layered structure is why the definition of “person” can vary from one area of law to another, even within the same federal code.
Who Falls Outside Legal Personhood
The definition also works in reverse. Anything the law does not equip with rights or duties is not a person, no matter how alive, valuable, or sophisticated it may be.
Unborn Fetuses
Federal law defines “person,” “human being,” “child,” and “individual” to include every member of the species homo sapiens who is “born alive” at any stage of development.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 1 USC 8 – Person, Human Being, Child, and Individual as Including Born-Alive Infant The statute defines “born alive” to mean complete expulsion or extraction from the mother, after which the infant breathes, has a heartbeat, shows pulsation of the umbilical cord, or moves voluntarily. It explicitly provides that nothing in it affirms, denies, or changes any legal status that might apply before that point.
A fetus has never been recognized as a “person” under the Fourteenth Amendment for purposes of constitutional rights.4Legal Information Institute. 14th Amendment, U.S. Constitution The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned the constitutional right to abortion but did not declare fetuses to be constitutional persons.7Supreme Court of the United States. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215 (2022) Some state statutes grant specific protections to the unborn, such as inheritance rights and fetal homicide laws, but those are targeted carve-outs, not grants of full legal personhood.
Deceased Individuals
Legal personhood ends at death. Once a person dies, they cease to be a legal actor. Their assets transfer into an estate, which is itself a separate legal entity that can be sued, can owe taxes, and must obtain its own tax identification number from the IRS. A living person, typically an executor or personal representative, steps in to manage the estate’s affairs, signing documents and making decisions on behalf of an entity that exists solely to wind down the decedent’s legal and financial obligations. The estate eventually distributes its remaining assets and dissolves.
Animals
Animals are classified as property, not legal persons. They cannot own assets, enter contracts, or file lawsuits in their own name. Owners can be held liable for damage their animals cause, and animal cruelty statutes impose criminal penalties for mistreatment, but these protections operate through human obligations rather than animal rights. Advocacy organizations have brought habeas corpus petitions arguing that certain cognitively complex animals deserve legal personhood, but no court has granted that status.
Artificial Intelligence
No court in the United States has granted legal personhood to an artificial intelligence system. The legal consensus treats AI as a tool — property owned and operated by natural or artificial persons who bear responsibility for what it does. A handful of states have gone further and enacted statutes explicitly prohibiting government entities from recognizing legal personhood in AI, with legislators citing the need to preserve the integrity of human rights and constitutional governance. At the federal level, no legislation addresses AI personhood directly, though the existing framework under the Dictionary Act, which defines “person” to include individuals and various business entities, leaves no obvious room for software to qualify.
Unincorporated Associations
An informal club, advocacy group, or neighborhood organization that has not registered as a corporation or other formal entity generally lacks independent legal personhood. These groups typically cannot sue, be sued, or hold property in their collective name. Without a statute granting them separate legal personality, liability for the group’s actions falls directly on the individual members. Some jurisdictions have adopted statutes that allow unincorporated associations to act as legal entities for limited purposes, such as holding title to property or appearing in court, but the default rule treats them as collections of individuals rather than persons in their own right.