3 Double Capacity and Double Personality

Capacity is the ability to bear rights and duties; every human of full age and sanity has one legal capacity. But one human can stand in two legal capacities at once, and where law treats those capacities as distinct persons, we get double personality.The leading illustration — the trustee: Suppose Kanchha holds Blackacre on trust for Sita, and separately owns Whiteacre in his personal capacity. As trustee-person he owes duties to Sita regarding Blackacre; as individual-person he owes no such duties regarding Whiteacre. If Sita lends him money personally, he can be trustee-person (owing duties to her) and debtor-person (owing debts to her) simultaneously. Equity developed the elegant rule: if a man is both trustee andbeneficiary, the two capacities are kept apart — he cannot release himself as trustee in favour of himself as beneficiary. One man, two persons, operating under a wall of separation.Other examples:• The executor and legatee: the man who administers an estate and is also a beneficiary under it holds the estate assets in one capacity and claims them in another.• The Crown's two bodies: the medieval fiction of the King's "body natural" and "body politic" — the king never dies; only the body natural dies, the body politic (the office) continues unbroken: "The King is dead; long live the King." The same idea underlies today's…