The Legal Construction of the Nonprofit Legal Person
A legal person is an organised formation created to achieve a defined purpose, possessing its own property, independently liable with that property, acquiring rights and obligations in its own name, entering into transactions and capable of appearing in court as claimant and defendant. A legal person may be corporatively organised, founded on membership, dependent on the status of its members or independent of them, and may or may not pursue entrepreneurship. The law draws a line here: a legal person whose purpose is commercial activity is created under the law on entrepreneurs, while a legal person whose purpose is non-commercial activity must be registered under the procedure established by the Civil Code. Public-law legal persons, and the state and municipality themselves, participate in civil-law relations just like private-law legal persons.