Schalock, Robert. “The new definition of intellectual disability, individual support and personal outcomes.” Spanish Journal of Intellectual Disability, 2014. Barranco, María del Carmen., Cuenca, Patricia and Ramiro, Miguel. Legal capacity and disability: Article 12 of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Alcalá: Anuario Facultad de Derecho – Universidad de Alcalá, 2012. ENTWICKLUNG 1. Definition. To talk about personality, it is necessary to first delimit certain concepts that are closely related, but are of a different nature. And it`s related to the definition of the concept of person. In the broadest sense of the term, it is understood that when we speak of man, we frame each human being and are therefore considered a person, but this was not the appreciation that prevailed among the Roman ancestors, for whom it was necessary to collect different statuses to be considered as such, and in another sense, they belatedly recognized the distinction between natural or natural persons and legal persons.
or fictitious or legal. 7 A natural person is any person who is in a position to be the holder of rights and to enter into obligations. The natural person is the human being, the human being legally considered, who is recognized as having the capacity to be the object of rights and duties, and above all as the owner of qualities and characteristics that must be recognized by law, since they characterize his human dignity. 8 The concept of a person itself may be confused with that of a legal person, but there is a fundamental difference between them, namely that, since the person is a broader concept, it reproduces the content of that concept, each object of law being a person, but any person not being regarded as a legal person, unless it interferes with a specific and specific legal relationship. If the natural person with the legal personality recognized by the rules adopted by the State acts precisely in the context of a particular legal relationship, he becomes a legal person. The legal entity is therefore the person himself who has immersed himself in a particular legal relationship, either as the holder of a right or as an active subject, or as the holder of an obligation or as a taxpayer 9. The ability to own the rights and obligations associated with certain legal relationships is called capacity. It unfolds in two manifestations or classes: the capacity of the law and the capacity of facts.
Similarly, the distinction between personality as an attribute and the indissoluble part of the person and legal capacity as an expression of a legal person in a given legal relationship, which makes it the holder of contractual rights and obligations, is indispensable. This capacity is divided into the ability to act de facto or to act, and the ability to redress or enjoy. In the legal order, the natural person has personality as an essential characteristic or quality. Thus, legal personality means the capacity to be the subject of legal relationships recognized by the State, by the legal system imposed on society as its will. It is general and immutable, which means that if you are a person, you have personality, regardless of the physical or psychological qualities or characteristics of the individual. Every human being, by the mere fact of being one, has a personality, a quality or an essential quality of him, which reflects his dignity.10 Legal personality is not a subjective right, but a quality that is precisely the prerequisite of all rights and duties, the basis of all other subjective legal relations, the primary and fundamental situation of man. 11 The recognition of that essential characteristic of the human person in the legal order, the personality, is imbued with ideological, political and ethical influences, not only as regards its formal recognition in civil law, but also, and above all, as regards the factual possibility that the State guarantees the free development of that personality to all human beings equally. It is known that in Roman law, the legal expression of the slave society of its time, it was necessary to have three statutes: libertatis, civitatis and familae to be considered a person with legal personality.
In later human history, various degrading situations were implemented for the recognition of personality, distinguishing people by skin color, religion, sex and, in some cases, even physical stature.12 A problem characteristic of traditional conceptions of legal personality is their reductionism. It focuses solely on the ability to intervene in legal relationships, mainly of a patrimonial nature, because of the excessively patrimonial nature typical of codified civil law, which leads the person to consider and regulate himself according to the object of a legal relationship of this type and not according to himself. The attributes and characteristics inherent in the quality of the person, his values and his personality lie in oblivion and thus deprive civil law of its most essential content, since its function and purpose must be nothing more than the defense of the person and his purposes. At this point, Kantian considerations are valid, suggesting that only man has an end in himself, as an absolute value; The rest, things, nature, the world outside man, have a relative value as a means. 13 In our time, on the other hand, great attention is paid to this very personal facet of our subject, regardless of the political or criminal approaches to the subject. Thus, legal personality is today reduced not to the capacity of the person to be the bearer of rights and obligations, but also to the recognition of his human dignity and his qualities inherent in the legal order. 14 Legal capacity, also known as legal capacity, is the capacity to possess, to enjoy, and possess duties and rights. It is closely related to personality, with the only difference that it is a potential condition that every human being possesses, and it is a concrete manifestation associated with certain legal relationships.
15 De facto capacity, also known as capacity to act or to exercise, is the capacity or ability to actually perform legal acts, that is to say, the capacity of a person to exercise the rights which he possesses and which are recognised by the legal order without the intervention of third parties himself.