Corporation sole

A corporation or body corporate is an individual or a group of people, such as an association or company, that has been authorized by the state to act as a single entity (a legal entity recognized by private and public law as "born out of statute"; a legal person in a legal context) and recognized as such in law for certain purposes. Early incorporated entities were established by charter (i.e., by an ad hoc act granted by a monarch or passed by a parliament or legislature). Most jurisdictions now allow the creation of new corporations through registration. Corporations come in many different types but are usually divided by the law of the jurisdiction where they are chartered based on two aspects: whether they can issue stock, or whether they are formed to make a profit. Depending on the number of owners, a corporation can be classified as aggregate (the subject of this article) or sole (a legal entity consisting of a single incorporated office occupied by a single natural person).

Registered corporations have a legal personality recognized by local authorities and their shares are owned by shareholders, whose liability is generally limited to their investment. One of the attractive early advantages corporations offered to their investors, compared to earlier business entities like sole proprietorships and joint partnerships, was limited liability. Limited liability separates control of a company from ownership and means that a passive shareholder in a corporation will not be personally liable either for contractually agreed obligations of the corporation, or for torts (involuntary harms) committed by the corporation against a third party (acts done by the controllers of the corporation).

The Crown is a political concept used in Commonwealth realms, analogous to the concept of the state in legal systems influenced by Roman civil law.

English common law never developed a concept of the state and left supreme executive power with the king. The concept of the Crown as a corporation sole developed in the Kingdom of England as a separation of the physical crown and property of the kingdom from the person and personal property of the monarch. It spread through English and later British colonisation, becoming embedded in the legal lexicon of the British dominions. As the dominions gained control over the royal prerogative in the 1930s, the concept evolved such that 'the Crown in right of' each realm and territory acts independently of the other realms and territories.

The body politic is a polity—such as a city, realm, or state—considered metaphorically as a physical body. Historically, the sovereign is typically portrayed as the body's head, and the analogy may also be extended to other anatomical parts, as in political readings of Aesop's fable of "The Belly and the Members". The image originates in ancient Greek philosophy, beginning in the 6th century BC, and was later extended in Roman philosophy.

Following the high and late medieval revival of the Byzantine Corpus Juris Civilis in Latin Europe, the "body politic" took on a jurisprudential significance by being identified with the legal theory of the corporation, gaining salience in political thought from the 13th century on. In English law the image of the body politic developed into the theory of the king's two bodies and the Crown as corporation sole.

A religious corporation is a type of religious non-profit organization, which has been incorporated under the law. Often these types of corporations are recognized under the law on a subnational level, for instance by a state or province government. The government agency responsible for regulating such corporations is usually the official holder of records, for instance, the Secretary of State. In the United States, religious corporations are formed like all other nonprofit corporations by filing articles of incorporation with the state. Religious corporation articles need to have the standard tax-exempt language the IRS requires. Religious corporations are permitted to designate a person to act in the capacity of corporation sole. This is a person who acts as the official holder of the title on the property, etc.

There are four different forms of religious corporations with regard to their laws and the way they function within government. The four classes are "the aggregate corporation, the trustee corporation, the modern form of the corporation sole, and the Roman Catholic Church".

The Government Legal Department (previously called the Treasury Solicitor's Department) is the largest in-house legal organisation in the United Kingdom's Government Legal Profession.

The department is headed by the Treasury Solicitor (formally, 'The Solicitor for the affairs of His Majesty's Treasury'). This office goes back several centuries. The office was enshrined in law by the Treasury Solicitor Act 1876 (39 & 40 Vict. c. 18), which established the Treasury Solicitor as a corporation sole (an office with perpetual succession). Employees of the department exercise legal powers which are vested in the corporation sole.