Legal Acts and Facts: Understanding Their Impact on Rights
Legal Facts and Acts: An Introduction
Fact: Any event that occurs in the world and is perceived through the senses.
Legal Fact: An event that results in the creation, modification, or termination of rights and obligations.
Types of Legal Facts
- Natural: Events that occur without human intervention.
- Human: Events that involve human action. These can be further categorized as:
- Voluntary: Acts performed with freedom, intention, and discernment.
- Involuntary: Acts lacking one or more of the elements of voluntary acts.
Both voluntary and involuntary acts can be lawful (if done according to the law) or unlawful (if they violate the law).
Vices of the Will
Vices of the will are defects that prevent the normal performance of legal acts. These are also known as vices of legal acts.
- Error: A false understanding of something.
- Ignorance: A lack of knowledge about something.
The difference between error and ignorance is that ignorance is not knowing anything about a subject, while error is acting without fully understanding the consequences.
- Error of Law: The civil code states that one cannot claim ignorance of the law as grounds for invalidating a legal act, as the law is presumed to be known by everyone.
- Mistake of Fact: This can be essential or accidental:
- Essential: When it concerns the nature of the act and impacts the people involved, the object of the act, the substantial quality of the act, or the primary cause of the act.
- Accidental: When it concerns an incidental quality of the thing. It does not invalidate the act unless it was a decisive factor.
- Fraud: An intentional action to deceive someone into performing a specific legal act.
Fraud invalidates an act if it is serious, is the main cause of the action, causes significant damage, and if there is no fraud on both sides. The perpetrator must compensate the victim.
- Physical Violence: Irresistible physical coercion that threatens a person’s liberty.
- Intimidation: Irresistible violence exerted to compel someone to perform a legal act. It can be physical or psychological.
The difference between physical violence and intimidation is that intimidation aims to instill fear, while physical violence forces someone to do something.
- Simulation: Occurs when the legal nature of an act is concealed under the guise of another, when the act contains insincere clauses or false dates, or when rights are transferred to people other than those intended.
- Fraud: Occurs when a person sells an asset to another to prevent its auction by their creditors for past debts.
Classification of Legal Acts
- Unilateral: Acts performed with the consent of one person (e.g., writing a will).
- Bilateral: Acts requiring the consent of more than one person (e.g., a sales contract).
- Positive: The birth, modification, or termination of the act depends on performing an action (e.g., signing a contract).
- Negative: The birth, modification, or termination of the act depends on *not* performing an action (e.g., an actor being restricted from appearing on another channel).
- Formal: Acts whose effectiveness depends on adherence to the form required by law (e.g., buying a property with a public document). They can be solemn or non-solemn.
- Solemn: Acts for which the law imposes certain forms that must be respected for the act to be valid.
- Non-solemn: Acts for which the law imposes certain forms, but if respected, the act is valid only between the parties involved, not in relation to third parties.
- Informal: Acts whose effectiveness does not depend on forms imposed by law (e.g., signing a lease).
- Onerous: Acts in which all parties receive reciprocal benefits (e.g., a sales contract).
- Gratuitous: Acts in which only one party makes a provision, intending to give something to another without expecting anything in return (e.g., a gift).
- Principal: Acts that exist independently (e.g., a lease).
- Accessory: Acts that exist because they depend on others (e.g., a guarantee contract).
- Inter Vivos: Acts that produce effects without relying on the death of any of the parties (e.g., any contract).
- Mortis Causa: Acts that produce effects after the death of the subjects who performed them (e.g., a will).
Proving Legal Acts
Legal acts can be proven by different methods:
- Documents: Public or private instruments that demonstrate the existence of a legal act.
- Public: Granted by a public official in the performance of their duties or by a notary public. They are considered true and have a certain date.
- Private: Kept by the parties involved and must contain their signatures. They acquire a certain date when presented at trial, given to a notary public, or upon the death of a party.
- Confession: A declaration by any of the parties involved. No one is obliged to testify against themselves, so lying is not penalized.
- Testimony: A declaration by impartial third parties who were not involved in the act but have knowledge of it through their senses. Lying constitutes perjury, which is punishable by imprisonment.
- Expert Opinion: A study by an expert in a relevant field, seeking to shed light on what happened in a legal context, as required by the judge.
- Information: Requests for reports to public or private offices to provide information or documents in their possession.
Void and Voidable Legal Acts
- Void: A legal sanction by which a legal act loses its effect. Its characteristics are:
- From the Law: The nullity must be recognized by law.
- The invalidity responds to past or current causes at the time of the legal act’s conclusion.
- This instrument prevents the effects that the parties intended to achieve.
- Voidable: Acts that, although covered by the law, depend on a judge’s investigation. The judge decides whether the act is voidable or not.
The difference between void and voidable acts is that void acts do not produce any legal effect because they are invalid from the moment they were performed, while voidable acts generate all agreed-upon effects until a judge determines their annulment.