The Formation, Development and Vicissitude of the Technology of Distinguishing the Person in Nature and the Person in Law:Concurrently on Capacity for Rights in the Civil Code of Germany

Personality is a prerequisite for membership in a given society. As such, the separation between the person in nature and the person in law is a basic pattern of the legal personality system, the pivotal element of which is the “propriety” of legal personality. During the primal ages of legal civilization, the elements of status, such as consanguinity, location and property served as criteria to assess personality, which consequently resulted in inequality. The basic characteristics of personality in modern laws is that the ethical elements of an individual have become the criteria to judge whether his/her legal personality is proper, which lays the foundation of law’s claim of equal treatment for all. The concept of “capacity for rights” in the Civil Code of Germany is a legal criterion prescribed by the positive law, which is still based on the foundation of human ethics.