권리의 담지자에 대하여 ─인격과 행위주체의 구분을 중심으로─

Recently, there has been a great deal of research on the concept of legal personhood, centered on the possibility of granting legal personhood to artificial intelligence, but there are still many issues that need to be examined. In this context, this study examines some points in the history of the concept of legal personhood that are of particular significance, but that have received little theoretical attention in current legal philosophical discourse within our jurisprudential academia. This study first examines the background from which the relatively familiar concept of persona emerges, showing that in order to understand it properly, we must first deepen our understanding of the concepts of hypostasis and caput. Furthermore, this study traces the emergence of the concept of a ‘persona ficta’, while legal personhood is often identified as a 'fictitious' concept in the writings of influential legal philosophers such as Hans Kelsen, and identifies its connection to legal issues such as the distinction between person and thing and the distinction between use and possession. More importantly, this study shows, following F.W. Maitland, that the introduction of the concept of ‘persona ficta’ eventually led to the gradual dismantling of the medieval social structure as “a system of groups, each of which in its turn is a system of groups” mainly through a careful examination of the ways in which the metaphor of ‘body politic’ and the concept of ‘persona ficta’ are combined in the work of Thomas Hobbes.