Greetings!
On 6/7/2010 11:27 PM, Todd Vincent wrote:
In the law, there are two concepts (a) Person and (b) Entity. In
simple terms:
A person is a human.
An entity is a non-human.
Well, yes, in simple terms but the law isn't always simple. ;-)
How would you handle municipalities that are considered to be "persons"
for purposes of Title 42 Section 1983 actions? (civil rights)
It remains a municipality for any number of legal purposes but is also a
"person" in other contexts.
I am sure a scan of the Federal Code (to say nothing of the case law)
would turn up any number of nuances to the concept "person." Perhaps not
as complex as the attribution of ownership rules in the IRC but enough
to be interesting.
The law in logic folks did a lot of work on legal concepts. One of the
journals was Modern Uses of Logic in Law, later became Jurimetrics.
Hope you are having a great day!
Patrick
Generally, these terms are used to distinguish who has the capacity to
sue, be sued, or who lacks the capacity to sue or be sued.
A *person* (human) can sue or be sued in an individual capacity, with
certain exceptions for juveniles, those who are legally insane, or who
otherwise are deemed or adjudicated under the law to lack legal capacity.
An *entity* must exist as a "legal person" under the laws of a state.
An entity's existence under the laws of a state occurs either through
registration (usually with the secretary of state) or by operation of
law (can happen with a partnership). Generally, anything else is not a
"entity". For example, you cannot sue a group of people on a beach as
a "entity" -- you would have to name each person individually. This is
true, because the group of people on a beach typically have done
nothing to form a legally recognized entity.
From a legal perspective, calling something a "Legal Entity" is
redundant; although from a non-legal perspective, it may provide
clarity. In contrast a "legal person" is not redundant because most
legal minds would understand this to mean an "entity" (i.e., a person
with the capacity to sue and be sued that is not a "human" person).
From a data modeling perspective, I find it straightforward to use the
terms "Person" and "Organization" because (a) typically only lawyers
understand "Entity" and (b) the data model for an organization tends
to work for both (legal) "entities" and for "organizations" that might
not fully meet the legal requirements for an entity. Taking the
example below, a large corporation or government agency (both of which
are [legal] entities) might be organized into non-legal divisions,
subdivisions, departments, groups, etc, that are not (legal) entities
but still might operate like, and need to be named as, an
"organization." Some companies have subsidiaries that are legal
(entities).
By adding "OrganizationType" to the Organization data model, you
provide the ability to modify the type of organization and can then
represent both (legal) entities and (legally unrecognized) organizations.
Taxing authorities (e.g., the IRS) have different classifications for
entities. An S Corporation, C Corporation, and a Non-Profit
Corporation are all (legal) entities, even though their tax status
differs.
Hope this is helpful for what it is worth.
Todd
See also U.S. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, Rule 17.
*From:* public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org
[mailto:public-egov-ig-requ...@w3.org] *On Behalf Of *Patrick Logan
*Sent:* Monday, June 07, 2010 7:50 PM
*To:* Mike Norton
*Cc:* public-egov...@w3.org; Dave Reynolds; William Waites; Linked
Data community; William Waites; Emmanouil Batsis (Manos)
*Subject:* Re: Organization ontology
Large corporations often have multiple legal entities and many
informal, somewhat overlapping business organizations. Just saying. I
wrangled with that. There're several different use cases for these for
internal vs external, customer/vendor, financial vs operations, etc.
On Jun 7, 2010 3:19 PM, "Mike Norton" <xsideofparad...@yahoo.com
<mailto:xsideofparad...@yahoo.com>> wrote:
I can see Manos' point. It seems that LegalEntity rather the
Organization would work well under a sub-domain such as .LAW or
.DOJ or .SEC, but under other sub-domains such as .NASA, the
Organization element might be better served as ProjectName. All
instances would help specify the Organization type, while keeping
Organization as the general unstylized element is probably ideal,
as inferred by William Waites.
Michael A. Norton
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*>>From:* Emmanouil Batsis (Manos) ma...@abiss.gr
<mailto:ma...@abiss.gr>
>>
>>a) the way i get FormalOrganization, it could as well be called
LegalEntity to be more precise....
--
Patrick Durusau
patr...@durusau.net
Chair, V1 - US TAG to JTC 1/SC 34
Convener, JTC 1/SC 34/WG 3 (Topic Maps)
Editor, OpenDocument Format TC (OASIS), Project Editor ISO/IEC 26300
Co-Editor, ISO/IEC 13250-1, 13250-5 (Topic Maps)
Another Word For It (blog): http://tm.durusau.net
Homepage: http://www.durusau.net
Twitter: patrickDurusau
