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Comment by basetop | Hacker News Reader

I forgot where I learned this, but I remember someone saying that in law there are really just two entities - person and property. A person is any entity that has rights. Only "persons" can have rights in law. A property is anything that can be owned. And all law is revolved around person and property.

The rights between a human, a corporation and a river might be different, but the fact that they all have rights is what unites them and why they are "persons". I believe it is a legacy when only human beings had rights. But the legal system got abstracted and we wanted to give rights to non-human entities.

Also, keep in mind that human beings had different rights as well. Some humans didn't even have rights and were not considered legal persons.

Colloquially, we use person as a synonym for human, but in law, person is anything with rights.

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With respect, this is nonsensical. This A or B abstraction is pretty useless when something can be both A and B. An obvious example is the corporation: this is (according to the current SCOTUS) a person with most of the rights of natural persons yet can and indeed, must be owned.

I would guess that the issue here is some mix of your not understanding the legal nuance here (as you allude to) and the law around it itself being incoherent. I don't claim to understand the laws here myself, but then the legal concept of a person is very tortured anyway.

I've always found "US govt VS $200" type court cases to be ridiculous.

Person vs Property.

Are they actually titled that way? That's hilarious.

Yep, that's exactly how civil forfeiture works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

Wow. I knew civil forfeiture was a claim brought against a property but I didn't realize that's literally what they would write as the defendant. I can't believe judges take this seriously...

There's a long tradition of actions in rem (against 'the thing') in law, especially in admiralty actions. If you're, say, the Port Authority for a harbour, and a foreign ship fails to pay its harbour dues, what do you do? The owner is an ocean away (and difficult to enforce jurisdiction over) but the ship is sitting right there and can (if necessary) be seized and sold. Looking at it that way it makes a lot more sense.

That explanation doesn't hold up to scrutiny, since slaves had some rights as well as being property at the same time. Or animals.

Most places when confronted with that inconsistency have eventually stopped treating people as property.

The legacy is that some persons had rights. Some had more than others (still a thing) and some had no rights (almost not a thing today) and some people were seen as the property of others barring special circumstances.

Rights and obligations. The two go hand-in-hand.

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