Section 66: Juristic persons, definition
Statutory text (Thai original)
นิติบุคคลย่อมมีสิทธิและหน้าที่ตามบทบัญญัติแห่งประมวลกฎหมายนี้หรือกฎหมายอื่น ภายในขอบแห่งอำนาจหน้าที่หรือวัตถุประสงค์ดังได้บัญญัติหรือกำหนดไว้ในกฎหมาย ข้อบังคับ หรือตราสารจัดตั้ง
Verbatim from the Royal Gazette / Office of the Council of State
English translation
A juristic person has rights and duties conformity with the provisions of this Code or of other law within the scope of its power and duties, or its object as provided by or defined in the law, regulation or constitutive act.
This English translation is provided for reference only and has not yet been firm-verified. Always rely on the Thai original.
Firm annotation
Section 66 is the gateway provision for all corporate, association, and foundation law in Thailand. A juristic person bears rights and duties in its own name; its members are generally shielded from personal liability except in narrow piercing situations (fraud, undercapitalization, failure to observe corporate formalities). The most common Thai juristic persons in firm practice are the private limited company (Book 3 §1096+), the foundation (§110+), the association (§78+), and the limited partnership (§1080+).
Why this matters in practice
For lawyers: acts performed outside a juristic person's stated objects may be challenged, but courts read objects broadly — if an act is reasonably necessary to carry out the stated purposes, it generally falls within scope. For laypeople: a company or government body can only exercise rights and duties that its founding documents or law allow it to have.
Legislative history
Part of the original Civil & Commercial Code codification; no major subsequent amendment. The provision applies to all categories of juristic persons: government bodies, companies, associations, and foundations.
Supreme Court decisions interpreting this section
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Supreme Court Judgment No. 12776/2558 (2015)
A public juristic person's power to manage its affairs under its governing statute includes authority to sue to recover public property, within the scope of sections 66 and 67 CCC.
The plaintiff provincial administrative organisation was a juristic person under its governing statute with the provincial governor as its legal representative. The Court held that the power to manage provincial affairs under that statute necessarily included authority to recover provincial public property and to bring legal proceedings in connection with it, consistent with the rights and duties of a juristic person under sections 66 and 67 CCC.
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Supreme Court Judgment No. 8077/2553 (2010)
Routine fundraising activities such as participating in rotating credit arrangements fall within a company's ordinary scope of business and are not ultra vires under section 66.
A company had participated in a revolving credit arrangement. The Court held that bidding in such an arrangement was a general method of raising funds in the same way as borrowing, and therefore fell within the company's ordinary business activities necessary to pursue its stated objectives — it was not an act outside the scope of the company's purposes under section 66.
Curated decisions with case numbers verified against the Supreme Court database. English renderings are the firm's editorial translation for study.
Cited in 11 Supreme Court decisions (1995 to 2023)
Selected citing decisions
- Decision 159/2566 (2023) Contracts Beyond a Company's Stated Objects Do Not Bind the Company — Ratification Does Not Cure
- Decision 12776/2558 (2015)
- Decision 8658-8686/2542 (1999)
- Decision 6557/2541 (1998)
- Decision 8033/2538 (1995)
- Decision 8033-8037/2538 (1995)
- Decision 4554/2559 (2016)
- Decision 1475/2548 (2005)
This list is selected automatically, weighted towards judgments that turn on this section rather than ones that merely recite it when passing sentence. It has not yet been reviewed by the firm.
Most often cited alongside
- Section 65 6
- Section 72 3
Sections that appear in the same judgments as this one most often. The figure is the number of decisions.
Counted across the firm's corpus of 83,652 Supreme Court decisions, 1921 to 2026. The count is complete; the stated year range trims rare outliers so it describes where the citations actually sit. These figures are computed by us and are not official court statistics. How we count these, and what we measured
Related guides on ThaiLawOnline
Cite this section
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Plain citation
Civil and Commercial Code, s. 66 (Thailand) -
Academic citation
Civil and Commercial Code (Thailand), s. 66. ThaiLawOnline, https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-66/ (accessed 8 August 2026). -
Thai citation
ป.พ.พ. มาตรา 66 -
Permalink
https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-66/ -
Embed on your site
<blockquote cite="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-66/"><p>A juristic person has rights and duties conformity with the provisions of this Code or of other law within the scope of its power and duties, or its object as provided by or defined in the law, regulation or constitutive act.</p><footer>Civil and Commercial Code, s. 66 (Thailand) — <a href="https://www.thailawonline.com/thai-civil-code/section-66/">ThaiLawOnline</a></footer></blockquote>
The Thai text is authoritative. The English is an unofficial translation by ThaiLawOnline, free to reuse with attribution.