Legal Concepts: Facts, Acts, and the Law Explained
Legal Concepts: Key Definitions
1. Legal Fact: Defined as an occurrence of nature or an event caused by humans, without the intent to cause legal consequences.
2. Legal Act: A voluntary or conscious human action that seeks to immediately establish legal relationships between people, creating, modifying, or extinguishing rights.
3. Difference Between Fact and Act: A legal fact is involuntary, while a legal act is voluntary.
4. Concept of Force Majeure and Fortuitous Event:
- Force Majeure: Events that cannot be resisted (e.g., floods, earthquakes).
- Fortuitous Event: Harm caused is attributed more to luck or fortune than to human action.
5. Illegal Voluntary Legal Fact: All acts that violate the laws, regardless of whether the offender intended to cause legal consequences.
6. Elements of a Pre-Act: Will, purpose, solemnity, legality.
7. Elements of Existence: Perfect existence of the act requires its essential elements and the absence of internal or external defects.
8. Illegality: A voluntary act without the intention of producing legal effects, but which is illegal.
9. Legal Concept of Person: Natural and moral (legal) persons. An entity or person having rights and obligations.
10. Concept of Individual and Moral Person:
- Individual (Natural Person): A human being with legally recognized attributes known as personality.
- Moral (Legal Person): An organization of persons recognized by law with the ability to contract rights and obligations to comply with lawful purposes for which it was created.
11. Attributes of Personality: Characteristics that enable legal implications between individuals, serving to identify and distinguish them from others.
12. How a Moral Person is Named: It can be any name, for example, Coca-Cola, or a company name, or the name of any of the partners.
13. Marital Status: Applies to individuals and can be single or married.
14. Concept of Law: The set of legal rules governing the conduct of individuals in society.
15. Concept of State, Nation, Sovereignty, Country:
- State: Ensures and maintains legal order; a corporation formed by a people.
- Nation: All the inhabitants of a country ruled by one government.
- Sovereignty: Resides in the people and is exercised through their representative constitutional bodies.
- Country: A region with a politically independent government that administers its own laws, security force, and population.
16. State Elements: Population, territory, government, legal power.
17. What is Legal: Governing in a particular place at a particular time. In democratic states, the legal system is formed by the State Constitution.
18. What is Government: The authorities who manage, supervise, and administer the institutions.
19. Territory: The space within which state power is exercised.
20. Understanding of Section 39 and 40:
- Article 39: National sovereignty resides essentially and originally in THE PEOPLE. All public power emanates from the people and is instituted for their benefit. The people have at all times the inalienable right to alter or modify their form of government.
- Article 40: THE MEXICAN PEOPLE CHOOSE to be incorporated in a representative, democratic, federal republic, composed of Free and Sovereign States in all matters concerning their internal affairs, but united in a Federation established according to principles of this fundamental law.
21. Kinds of Governments Governing the Mexican State: States are free and sovereign in all that relates to their internal regime. The political model refers to the organizational model of constitutional power which the state adopts according to different types of powers.