We explain what legal acts and facts are, what differentiates them, their characteristics, how they are classified and examples.
What are legal acts and facts, and what differentiates them?
In the language of Right, we often speak of legal facts and legal acts, two concepts that designate different referents in the order of jurisprudence, and that should be defined separately.
In the first place, a legal fact is any event, phenomenon or action of natural or human origin, which the appropriate legislators consider to generate legal effects or consequences, such as the creation, modification or extinction of rights and obligations.
In other words, a legal fact is anything that can occur and have legal consequences, according to what is typified in some law, rule, habit or ordinance.
Legal facts, therefore, are of an immensely varied nature, and are classified according to their natural and human origin, depending on whether they are the consequence of human conduct or not. Legal acts are a type of legal fact, as we will see shortly. Examples of legal facts are: death, the birth of an individual, a declaration of war, a natural disaster, a health catastrophe.
For their part, legal acts are legal facts as well, but always voluntary, that are intended to produce legal consequences in accordance with the Law, whether to create, modify or extinguish rights and obligations.
Therefore, they are always the fruit of Will and require the presence of three basic elements: one or more subjects that express their will, an object or purpose of the legal act, and a legal relationship that binds them.
In many laws, legal acts are classified according to various criteria, such as:
- According to their type of action, they can be classified into positive and negative. The former consist of carrying out or carrying out an act (carrying out a job, for example), while the latter require its omission or abstention (not approaching a person who has filed a precautionary restraining measure, for example).
- Depending on the number of parties involved, they can be classified into unilateral and bilateral. In the former, the will of a single party intervenes (such as wills, for example), while in the latter the consent of two or more parties is required (as in purchase-sale contracts, for example).
- According to their relationship with the law, they can be classified as formal and non-formal. The former require the observance of the law, according to its formalities (such as a Work contract, for example), while the latter do not require any solemnity to be valid (such as an oral agreement between the parties, for example).
- Depending on the distribution of the obligation, they can be classified as free and onerous. In the former, the obligation falls on a single party or individual, according to a principle of liberality (as in the case of a donation, for example), while in the latter the obligations are reciprocal and both subjects are bound at the same time ( as in the case of a rental agreement, for example).
Difference between facts and legal acts
The fundamental difference between legal facts and legal acts, according to most laws, has to do with the origin of the event that causes the legal consequences.
If said event is natural or social, without the will of one of the parties directly intervening, it is considered a legal fact. On the contrary, in a legal act the express will of the parties who seek a specific legal consequence intervenes.
For example: a child at birth acquires a certain series of rights, which are granted by law and the legal system, without him having to expressly request them (since, among other things, he cannot do so yet), such as the right to have a nationality. His birth is, therefore, a legal fact.
But if that same individual later wishes to contract a new nationality and renounce the one he obtained at birth, we will instead be in the presence of a legal act, since in this case the express will of the individual mediates with respect to a legal consequence that he wishes to obtain. : the extinction of their nationality and the acquisition of another.