In law, individual capacity is a term of art referring to one's status as a natural person, distinct from any other role. For example, an officer, employee or agent of a corporation, acting "in their individual capacity" is acting as himself, rather than as an agent of the corporation. Thus, their actions, in their capacity as an individual would not generally incur a liability on the part of the corporation, nor would they have any protection from liability for their own actions as an individual.
In general, a person may be said by a second party to be acting in their capacity as an individual, whenever the person's actions are the result of their own decisions, rather than being actions to which they are obligated in their capacity as an agent of another person or agency.
Famous quotes containing the words individual and/or capacity:
“As a science of the unconscious it is a therapeutic method, in the grand style, a method overarching the individual case. Call this, if you choose, a poet’s utopia.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)