Legal status describes the legal
rights
Rights are law, legal, social, or ethics, ethical principles of freedom or Entitlement (fair division), entitlement; that is, rights are the fundamental normative rules about what is allowed of people or owed to people according to some legal sy ...
, duties and obligations of a
person
A person (: people or persons, depending on context) is a being who has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations suc ...
or
entity
An entity is something that Existence, exists as itself. It does not need to be of material existence. In particular, abstractions and legal fictions are usually regarded as entities. In general, there is also no presumption that an entity is Lif ...
, or a subset of those rights and obligations.
[ (defining "status")] The term may be used to describe a person's legal condition with respect to personal rights, but excluding proprietary relations, such as their having the status of a spouse. It may also refer to
legal capacity apart from other elements of personal status, such as the status of a
minor,
[ (defining "status")] or the set of
privileges,
obligations, powers or restrictions that a person or entity receives through
legislation
Legislation is the process or result of enrolling, enacting, or promulgating laws by a legislature, parliament, or analogous governing body. Before an item of legislation becomes law it may be known as a bill, and may be broadly referred ...
.
[See, e.g., ''Recognition of unmarried cohabitation as a legal status worthy of protection'', 1 N.C. Family Law Practice ยง 1:5]
The term may also refer to a person's legal condition as imposed by law but without consent, such as the status of an indentured servant when
indentured servitude is enforced by law.
Legal status may be something that arises solely by operation of law, such as being a
Social Security
Welfare spending is a type of government support intended to ensure that members of a society can meet basic human needs such as food and shelter. Social security may either be synonymous with welfare, or refer specifically to social insurance ...
recipient, describing the individual's relationship to the law.
Footnotes
International law
Conflict of laws
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