Can an animal be a legal person?

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. This unit studies the concept, its paradoxes (double personality, the unborn, the dead, animals) and its greatest creation: the juridical person.