Discuss the legal status of the dead person, the unborn person and the animal, showing in each case how law protects without (or beyond) personality.

Law does not confer rights and duties on "human beings" as such — it confers them on persons. "Person" is a term of art: the Roman persona was the mask worn by actors in the theatre, and the metaphor stuck — a legal person is any entity that wears the mask of personality in the courtroom of the law. The equation "person = human being" is therefore false in both directions: some humans may lack (full) legal personality, and many non-humans — companies, temples, universities, the State itself — possess it abundantly. A person, in law, is any being to whom the law regards as capable of rights and duties (Salmond's formulation, echoed by Gray: the "unit of legal rights and duties"). Legal personality is thus a creature of law and not of nature — it is a bundle of capacities: capacity to own property, to contract, to sue and be sued, to hold rights. The concept does philosophical work: Legal persons need not be "real" persons. A company exists because the Companies Act says it exists. Personality is a legal technique, an umbrella the law holds over an entity. The number of persons need not match the number of humans. One human may bear several persons (see 7.3 below); several humans (or none!) may constitute one person (a corporation).…