What survives of a dead person's legal position?

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).…