Several years ago, I wrote about the various meanings of "person" in the California Corporations Code. All of the definitions mentioned in that post included corporations within the list of persons. If a corporation is a person, is it also an individual?
The term individual is derived from the Latin words in and dividuus, meaning not and divided. Thus, atoms were considered to be indivisible matters ( "Ille atomos quas appellat, id est corpora individua propter soliditatem . . .").∗ I typically think of natural persons when I hear "individual". However, corporations may have a variety constituent parts, but they are quite literally bodies (corpus is the Latin word for a body). Thus, it may be no surprise that the California Securities Owners Protection law defines "individual" to include every domestic or foreign private corporation. Cal. Corp. Code § 27002(a). The list also includes some incorporeal entities such as unincorporated associations, partnerships, syndicates and even leagues.