The natural law and positivist approaches to legal understanding in the context of revealing the category of legal personality of professional participants in capital markets

This article aims to analyze the main philosophical concepts used in understanding the legal category of legal personality and to conduct a descriptive study of the concepts related to this category that prevail in domestic science. The author of the article substantiates the position that the approaches to the theoretical and legal developments of the category of universal legal personality of legal entities should be based on the natural law type of legal understanding. At the same time, the article analyzes domestic authors’ approaches to understanding the legal category of legal personality and compares these approaches with those prevailing in Western countries. Furthermore, the author attempts to justify the expediency of distinguishing exclusive legal personality, given the positivist approach that underlies the construction of the model of the exclusive type of legal personality of professional participants in capital markets. In our opinion, establishing the exclusive legal personality of legal entities is a state-imposed limitation on their universal legal capacity, such as the ability to participate in certain civil-law relations, considering the social importance of the type of activity carried out by these entities. After all, the proper functioning of capital markets is crucial to the financial stability of the country. Capital markets, along with commodity markets, directly influence the formation of exchange rates by attracting foreign investment into the country’s economy. They can also act as a catalyst for economic growth by accumulating financial resources from the population to create capital-intensive productions with high value-added end products. However, achieving such results depends on the balanced state policy in the field of regulating the activities of professional participants in capital markets. To limit the speculative nature of such entities and ensure sustainable economic development, the scope of their legal capacity is narrowed by directly specifying in the law the types of activities they are permitted to engage in.