Obligations Flashcards
Concept of Obligation
Legal relationship (obligatio) that creates bonds of one person (debtor) to another (creditor), which may require a certain behaviour - provision (praestare). This can consist of giving, making or carrying out, or of not giving, doing, or making such provision.
Legal Facts
Every event can be considered a legal fact since the legal system takes it into consideration and attributes legal consequences to it (legally relevant and produce legal effects, creating extinguished or modifying rights and obligations).
A legal fact is made up of events that cannot be avoided/ are involuntary (no control over them) - being born/ dying.
Legal Acts
Voluntary actions that are meant to produce legal effects.
May be considered as a manifestation of will that intends to create, modify or extinguish rights and obligations.
Legal acts are those actions done by the individuals because they want to (selling/ divorcing)
Essential elements of Legal Acts (without them the act cannot be carried out)
Will: requires a voluntary element to act.
Object: This manifestation of will must have a purpose of producing one or several consequences sanctioned by law.
Subject of Legal Acts
Can involve one or more subjects.
- Only one individual: author
- Can be formed by more than one person.
To be performed: will of the parties is necessary, but also the recognition of the authority.
Business Acts
Declaration or agreement of wills, through which the individual or individuals intend to achieve a legal result of a self-regulatory nature of their own interests.
Business Acts Requirements
1) Common essential elements:
- Declaration of will (consent)
- The object
- The cause
- The form
2) Natural elements. Those that each type of business normally carries with it, unless their authors exclude them.
3) Accidental elements.-Those that only concur if the parties expressly agree upon them.
Types of Legal Acts
a) Free or Due: Performed by the subject because of a legal norm demands it (Example: food pension for children)
b) Lawful or Unlawful: Depending of their accordance with the legal system.
c) Negotiable or Non-negotiable: Legal acts imply decisions in two steps: first the performance itself and secondly to fix or regulate its legal consequences.
- - Those legal acts where the parties can do both are Negotiable (Ex: agreeing consequences of buying/selling a house).
- - Non-negotiable are those in which the second step is always determined by law or ex lege. (Ex: marriage. The consequences are regulated by law).
- - The most important legal acts are the declarations of will or business legal acts since they will form the legal business.
Sources of Obligations
A. By Law (ex lege).
B. By Contract. The contract is an agreement or pact (pactum) which owns a form recognised by law, accompanied by the capacity to ground or constitute an obligation, producing action and a compulsory link.
– The key aspect to create obligations is the will of the parties.
C. By Quasi Contract, which is an act which gives rise to a extra-contractual obligation and that can lead to compensation for fault, negligence and incompetence in the performance of the act.
– There is no agreement of wills between the subjects, but the behaviour of one of them produced the birth of the obligation because the law imposes it. (Improper payment)
D. By Unlawful Acts and Omissions where intervenes fault or negligence.
– The obligation to repair the damage caused is generated in those acts involving fault or negligence art. 1.902 CC (Non-contractual Civil Liability).
