Overview

The legal person - the corporation, the foundation, the collective entity that holds property, bears liability, and acts in law - is one of the most consequential legal constructions in the Western tradition. This book argues that it does not come from Rome. The Legal Person That Never Existed traces the true origin of the doctrine of legal personality to Innocent IV's Apparatus in quinque libros decretalium (c. 1250), a canonistic commentary written in exile in Lyon. Innocent IV's persona ficta - the legal fiction by which a collective entity is treated as a single person - solved specific institutional problems of the medieval Church. It was not Roman. Yet through a chain of scholarly misattribution - first by Innocent IV himself, then by Bartolus de Saxoferrato, then by Savigny and Gierke - the doctrine was retrojected onto Roman sources that do not contain it. Drawing on primary sources from the Digest to the Vatican manuscripts, and engaging the full tradition of legal scholarship from Koessler and Tierney to Dewey and Blair/Stout, this monograph systematically dismantles both the Fiction Theory and the Reality Theory as retrojects, and reconstructs the actual genealogy of the legal person: a medieval canonistic invention that became the invisible foundation of corporate law across five continents. For legal historians, comparatists, corporate law theorists, and anyone who has ever wondered why the law treats a company as a person.

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