The Crown

The Crown is the state in all its aspects within the jurisprudence of the Commonwealth realms and their sub-divisions (such as Crown dependencies, provinces or states), although the term is not only a metonym for the State. The Crown is a corporation sole that represents the legal embodiment of executive, legislative, and judicial governance in the monarchy of each country. These monarchies are united by the personal union of their monarch, but they are separate as states. The concept of the Crown developed first in the Kingdom of England as a separation of the literal crown and property of the nation state from the person and personal property of the monarch. The concept spread through English and later British colonisation and is now rooted in the legal lexicon of the other 15 independent realms and the three Crown dependencies. In this context it should not be confused with any physical crown, such as those of the British royal regalia.

The term is also found in expressions such as crown land, which some countries refer to as public land or state land, as well as in some offices, such as Minister of the Crown, crown attorney, and crown prosecutor (other terms being district attorney, state prosecutor, or public prosecutor).

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