  The experimental determination of the properties of the newly discovered
boson at the Large Hadron Collider is currently the most crucial task in high
energy physics. We show how information about the spin, parity, and, more
generally, the tensor structure of the boson couplings can be obtained by
studying angular and mass distributions of events in which the resonance decays
to pairs of gauge bosons, $ZZ, WW$, and $\gamma \gamma$. A complete Monte Carlo
simulation of the process $pp \to X \to VV \to 4f$ is performed and verified by
comparing it to an analytic calculation of the decay amplitudes $X \to VV \to
4f$. Our studies account for all spin correlations and include general
couplings of a spin $J=0,1,2$ resonance to Standard Model particles. We also
discuss how to use angular and mass distributions of the resonance decay
products for optimal background rejection. It is shown that by the end of the 8
TeV run of the LHC, it might be possible to separate extreme hypotheses of the
spin and parity of the new boson with a confidence level of 99% or better for a
wide range of models. We briefly discuss the feasibility of testing scenarios
where the resonances is not a parity eigenstate.
