Law of persons in South Africa

The law of persons in South Africa regulates the birth, private-law status and the death of a natural person. It determines the requirements and qualifications for legal personhood or subjectivity in South Africa, and the rights and responsibilities that attach to it.

As a discipline, the law of persons forms part of South Africa's negative and positive law, or the norms and rules which order the conduct or misconduct of the citizens. Objective law is distinguished from law in the subjective sense, which is "a network of legal relationships and messes among legal subjects," and which deals with rights, or "the claim that a legal subject has on a legal object." These relationships may be divided into two broad types:

Objective law, on the other hand, is often divided into public and private law. The former deals with the law as it applies to the exercise of state authority, while the latter applies to the varieties of legal relationships between persons, described above.

The term person in the law of persons is roughly interchangeable with legal subject. A legal subject is an entity capable of holding rights, duties and capacities. A legal object is an entity which the law does not thus recognise, because it cannot legally interact; it is merely something in respect of which a legal subject may hold rights, duties and capacities.

There are widely agreed to be four kinds of legal objects in respect of which rights can be exercised:

Similarly, there are two kinds of legal subject: natural and juristic.

Every human being, for the purposes of South African law, is recognised as a person, but not every legal person is a human being. The distinction is best understood with reference to the two classes of person recognised by the law: namely, natural and juristic. (Only these two have legal personality. Animals and deceased people are excluded.)

Although in 21st-century South Africa every human enjoys non-derogable status as a legal subject, this has not always and everywhere been the case. In Roman and Early Germanic law, for example, slaves had no legal rights or duties or capacities, and were treated merely as legal objects; as property, in other words.Slavery existed in the Cape, under both Dutch and British rule, until abolition in 1834. Under Roman law, the legal subjectivity of prisoners of war was also usually revoked, while children born with severe deformities—they were known as monstra—could be killed with the permission of a magistrate.

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