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Your Terms and Conditions section is like a contract between you and your customers. You make information and services available to your customers, and your customers must follow your rules.

Common items in a terms and conditions agreement allow you to:

• Withdraw and cancel services, and make financial transactions.
• Manage customer expectations, such as liability for information errors or website downtime.
• Explain your copyright rules, such as attribution, adaptation, commercial or non-commercial use, etc.
• Set rules for user behavior, like forbidding unlawful behavior, hate speech, bullying, promotions, spam, etc.
• Disable user accounts.
• Write down any other terms or conditions that protect you or your audience.

 “Persons” are protected in the US Constitution in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment, from governmental (state or federal) action. In the abortion context, however, the term “constitutional personhood” typically refers to whether the unborn child is protected by the Constitution or, more specifically, by the Fourteenth Amendment. 

Personhood or personality is the status of being a person. Definin'

g personhood is a controversial topic in philosophy and law and is closely tied with legal and political concepts of citizenship, equality, and liberty. According to law, only a legal person (either a natural or a juridical person) has rights, protections, privileges, responsibilities, and legal liability.[1]

Personhood continues to be a topic of international debate and has been questioned critically during the abolition of human and nonhuman slavery, in debates about abortion and in fetal rights and/or reproductive rights, in animal rights activism, in theology and ontology, in ethical theory, and in debates about corporate personhood and the beginning of human personhood.[2]

Processes through which personhood is recognized socially and legally vary cross-culturally, demonstrating that notions of personhood are not universal. 

To begin, the Constitution contains two provisions that provide absolute protections of life.  Article I, Sections 9 and 10, respectively, prohibit the federal and state governments from passing bills of attainder or ex post facto laws.  For example, a law that designates a specific person for death is a bill of attainder, while a law that increases the punishment for a crime already committed from imprisonment to death is an ex post facto law.

Additionally, the Fifth Amendment contains two clauses that provide express protections of life.  The grand jury clause provides that, ordinarily, a person cannot be tried for an offense that carries the death penalty unless indicted by a grand jury.  The double jeopardy clause provides that, ordinarily, if a person has been tried and either acquitted or convicted and sentenced to imprisonment, the person cannot be tried again for the same offense and sentenced to death.

Otherwise, a federal or state deprivation of life is permissible if the courts, and ultimately, a majority of Supreme Court Justices, decide the deprivation is permissible.  

The decisions turn on how the Court, or more specifically, the justices, interpret the Constitution.

Here, the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which apply to the federal and state governments, respectively, are open to a tremendous amount of judicial interpretation.  According to the Court, the clauses provide two different types of protection: procedural due process, which requires that before depriving a person of life, liberty, or property, the government must follow certain procedures, and substantive due process, which requires that if depriving a person of life, liberty, or property, the government must have sufficient justification.

Moreover, the Court has ruled that the death penalty can be challenged under the Eighth Amendment as cruel and unusual punishment, and the use of deadly force by the police under the Fourth Amendment as an impermissible seizure.

And that is the extent of the Constitution's protection of life.  In contrast, several constitutional provisions, including due process, have the effect of supporting a deprivation of life.

While procedural due process is not involved when the issue concerns the constitutionality of a law, such as the violation of a constitutional right, the concept of substantive due process was invented by the Supreme Court, in part, to protect rights that are not mentioned in the Constitution, and is used in two areas with regard to issues concerning life: to justify the refusal of life-saving medical treatment, and to justify abortion.

Also, the Fourteenth Amendment contains a clause that prohibits the state governments from denying "any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."  And the Court has interpreted the Fifth Amendment to apply equal protection to the federal government.

Main articles: Juridical person, Corporate personhood, University, Voluntary association, and Foundation (nonprofit)

Today, in statutory and corporate law, certain social constructs are legally considered persons. In many jurisdictions, some corporations and other organizations are considered juridical persons (a subtype of legal persons) with standing to own, possess, enter contracts, as well as to sue or be sued in court, or even to be indicted, in selected jurisdictions. This is known as legal or corporate personhood.

In 1819, the US Supreme Court ruled in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, that corporations have the same rights as natural persons to enforce contracts.

Main article: Leviathan (Hobbes book)

The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic" (without leadership or the concept of sovereignty). Individuals in the state of nature were apolitical and asocial. This state of nature is followed by the social contract.

The social contract was seen as an "occurrence" during which individuals came together and ceded some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs.[12] This resulted in the establishment of the state, a sovereign entity like the individuals now under its rule used to be, which would create laws to regulate social interactions. Human life was thus no longer "a war of all against all".

The state system, which grew out of the social contract, was, however, also anarchic (without leadership). Just as the individuals in the state of nature had been sovereigns and thus guided by self-interest and the absence of rights, so states now acted in their self-interest in competition with each other. Just like the state of nature, states were thus bound to be in conflict because there was no sovereign over and above the state (more powerful) capable of imposing some system such as social-contract laws on everyone by force. Indeed, Hobbes' work helped to serve as a basis for the realism theories of international relations, advanced by E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau. Hobbes wrote in Leviathan that humans ("we") need the "terrour of some Power" otherwise humans will not heed the law of reciprocity, "(in summe) doing to others, as wee would be done to".[13]

John Locke's conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes' in several fundamental ways, retaining only the central notion that persons in a state of nature would willingly come together to form a state. Locke believed that individuals in a state of nature would be bound morally, by the Law of Nature, not to harm each other in their lives or possessions. Without government to defend them against those seeking to injure or enslave them, Locke further believed people would have no security in their rights and would live in fear. Individuals, to Locke, would only agree to form a state that would provide, in part, a "neutral judge", acting to protect the lives, liberty, and property of those who lived within it.[14]

While Hobbes argued for near-absolute authority, Locke argued for inviolate freedom under law in his Second Treatise of Government. Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.[citation needed]

The Mandate of Heaven (Chinese: 天命; pinyin: Tiānmìng; Wade–Giles: T'ien-ming; lit. 'Heaven's will') is a Chinese political philosophy that was used in ancient and imperial China to legitimize the rule of the King or Emperor of China. According to this doctrine, heaven (天, Tian) – which embodies the natural order and will of the universe – bestows the mandate on a just ruler of China, the "Son of Heaven". If a ruler was overthrown, this was interpreted as an indication that the ruler was unworthy and had lost the mandate. It was also a common belief that natural disasters such as famine and flood were divine retributions bearing signs of Heaven's displeasure with the ruler, so there would often be revolts following major disasters as the people saw these calamities as signs that the Mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn.[1]

A brief flow chart depicting the flow of auctoritas in the transfer of the Mandate of Heaven at the transition of dynastic cycles.[citation needed]

The Mandate of Heaven does not require a legitimate ruler to be of noble birth, depending instead on how well that person can rule. Chinese dynasties such as the Han and Ming were founded by men of common origins, but they were seen as having succeeded because they had gained the Mandate of Heaven. The concept is in some ways similar to the European concept of the divine right of kings; however, unlike the European concept, it does not confer an unconditional right to rule. Retaining the mandate is contingent on the just and able performance of the rulers and their heirs.

Intrinsic to the concept of the Mandate of Heaven was the right of rebellion against an unjust ruler. The Mandate of Heaven was often invoked by philosophers and scholars in China as a way to curtail the abuse of power by the ruler, in a system that had few other checks. Chinese historians interpreted a successful revolt as evidence that Heaven had withdrawn its mandate from the ruler. Throughout Chinese history, times of poverty and natural disasters were often taken as signs that heaven considered the incumbent ruler unjust and thus in need of replacement.

The concept of the Mandate of Heaven was first used to support the rule of the kings of the Zhou dynasty (1046–256 BC), and legitimize their overthrow of the earlier Shang dynasty (1600–1069 BC). It was used throughout the history of China to legitimize the successful overthrow and installation of new emperors, including by non-Han Chinese dynasties such as the Qing (1636–1912).