Legal Relations

We explain what legal relationships are, their elements, types and other characteristics. In addition, the tax legal relationship.

legal relations
Legal relationships are the result of legal agreements, such as contracts.
Summary of Contents

Legal relations are called legal link between two or more legal subjects according to which it is possible that one may require the other to comply with certain agreed or pre-established terms in the Law. It can also be seen as the legal correlate of social relations, that is, the legal regulations that control them and give them legal existence.

The parties involved in a legal relationship are, generally, linked from an active position or power, and a passive position or duty, since the law enshrines the existence of duties and rights, always within a common regulatory framework. to the entire society. These obligations can also be reciprocal, as in the case of a purchase and sale.

For this reason, legal relationships are the result of obligatory sources that is, contracts or similar agreements before the law that are capable of promoting a mandatory condition, although it also does so for a crime, for example.

See also: Human relations

The main feature of legal relations is that take place between subjects, never between subjects and objects (as happens with de facto relationships).

There are even those who consider them as another name for the normative assumption of law itself, that is, for the law itself, which obliges legal subjects to comply with their duties while protecting their rights. From the point of view of the holder or subject, legal relationships are now called subjective rights, and can therefore be of two types: political and civil.

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On the other hand, the legal relationships can be of two types: public or private depending on its purpose, in the same way that private law can be commonly distinguished from public law.

Legal relationships operate based on four basic or fundamental elements, which are:

  • The creditor or active subject. Who has the right to demand compliance with an obligation, whether payment or of another nature.
  • The debtor or passive subject. Who is the person obliged by law to comply with a prior agreement or to act in a certain way.
  • The benefit object Which is a legally regulated action, such as giving something in possession, giving something as property, doing or not doing, etc.
  • The legal link or link of attribution. The same enshrined in the Law and that allows the creditor to demand compliance with a specific action from the debtor.

According to its content, there is generally a distinction between four types of legal relationships:

  • Mandatory relationships Those in which the duty to comply with the rights of other subject(s) takes precedence, such as the return of a loan to the bank.
  • Legal-real relations Those that indicate the right of the owner to dispose of his property in the way he sees fit, such as the right to sell or rent.
  • Family relationships Those that seek to guarantee the rights of the family institution, such as the right to food.
  • Hereditary or succession relationships Those that concern the successors of a deceased person, such as the fulfillment of wills.
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The fundamental difference between a legal relationship and a legal bond in many cases lies in the tradition of legal interpretation that is preferred. In some cases, the legal relationship is established as what binds creditor and debtor, which comes from Roman law as Justinian considered:

“Obligatio est iuris vinculum, quo necessitate adstringimur alicuius solvendae rei secundum nostrae civilitatis iura” (“Obligation is a bond the right, by which we are constrained with the need to pay something according to the laws of our city.

Instead, Other authors prefer to think of the legal bond as an element independent of the subjects placed at the same level. As will be seen, it is a rather semantic distinction.

This type of legal relationship is understood as the one that exists between the treasury, acting as an active subject, and those passive subjects of the company who, by law, are designated as taxpayers, and which allows the former to demand tax from them, or that is, the payment of the corresponding taxes.

In that sense, It is a legal relationship that arises between the State and taxpayers based on the rules that regulate the fiscal participation of citizens, imposing positive and negative obligations, as well as rights.

Continue with: Fiscal or tax law

References

  • “Legal relationship” on Wikipedia.
  • “Legal relationship” in Legal Encyclopedia.
  • “The legal relationship: concept” at the University of Córdoba (Spain).
  • “The legal relationship” in La Guía 2000.

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Categories Law