Legal persons are commonly defined as entities attributed legal positions, often a capacity for legal rights and duties, and divided into natural persons, if human individuals, or juristic persons, if another kind of entity. Although pervasive in modern legal theory and legislation, these tenets are recent from a historical perspective. I will argue that legal persons have been conceptualised differently and that the modern tenets are dependent on specific historical events. The tenets are therefore historically contingent. Rather than necessary features of legal thought, they are open to analytical reappraisal as well as normative and political reconsideration. The historical contingency of the tenets is demonstrated through an analysis of the meaning given to the term ‘persona’ and equivalent terms in historical sources and the author’s reasons for giving the terms a particular meaning. The analysis will show that the tenets are contingent upon their function in modern law as well as upon earlier conceptualisations. In conclusion, I will discuss the implications of this historical contingency for future legislative and theoretical re-conceptualisations of the legal person.
Research on constitutional amendment procedures has primarily focused on the policy outcomes produced by constitutional amendments or on the effects of amendment rules on constitutional rigidity. This article examines constitutional amendment procedures as value-expressive institutional designs. Building on a classification of amendment procedures, the article employs ideal types drawn from political philosophy as analytical tools. It argues that specific configurations of constitutional amendment procedures can be interpreted as expressing values characteristic of liberalism, republicanism, and populism. Liberal-oriented procedures emphasise the protection of fundamental rights through countermajoritarian constraints, judicial veto players, and unamendability clauses. Republican-oriented procedures prioritise deliberation, temporal safeguards, and consensus-building mechanisms aimed at reducing arbitrariness in constitutional change. Populist-oriented procedures privilege the direct and unmediated expression of popular sovereignty, often minimising institutional filters and deliberative constraints. The article argues that the constructed typology may serve as an analytical tool for assessing the ideological character of constitutional systems through the political-philosophical assumptions embedded in their amendment procedures. To do so, it proposes a two-step constitutional amendment congruence test to analyze the underlying political philosophy within the amendment procedure and to assess whether constitutional practice and informal or unwritten elements mediate or depart from the formal design within informal constitutional change. The higher the congruence, the stronger the analytical value it has to assess the political-philosophical character of the constitution as a whole.
