Los hechos jurídicos

Abstract

This study is about “legal acts”, which is a division of “the general aspects of private law. Most of the Civil Codes in the 20th and 21st centuries which include these general aspects, dedicate several of their articles to rule on said matter and determine in this way their nature, require-ments and effects .An example of all this are the Civil Codes in Germany (BGB), Brazil, Mexico, Switzerland among other countries. The new Civil and Commercial Code in force in Argentina since Au-gust 1st, 2015 deals with this matter in Book I, Title V, Chapter I (articles 257 to 264).Acts are external events within the social reality which have the power to alter or modify the surrounding environment. In this context, their analysis and study only apply to those actions or facts of a juridical nature and are therefore of interest to the law. All this makes it necessary to take a stand in order to explain when and why an event either natural o human is to be considered a “legal act”. To give an answer to this question, there are two opposed theories on the subject and some other irrelevant opinions. In this present, it has been intended to define and clarify the main points of both theories. One idea sustains that a legal act is the one which has in itself the character and the ability to achieve a goal, that is, the legal effect. This leads to defining it as the causal event of logical connection making it possible to get said legal effect then becoming a quality of the object itself. This theory is called “traditional” or “causative”. The second theory, supported by most of the Italian lawmakers and well spread in the modern doctrine considers that the legal acts themselves do not have a particular virtue but that their legal or juridical character is given by the fact that they are presupposed to have fulfilled all sta-tutory requirements. All this has been called fattispecie or “regulating factual presuppositions” by the Italian lawmakers.When a rule or law understands that to have a legal consequence it is necessary to do one or more acts, said acts become legal acts. For example , the birth or the death of a person is a “natural” act, but in most legislations the person who is born has the right to acquire, and the deceased to transfer their estate to their heirs. Other aspects have also been considered, in particular the classification of the legal acts, and the most important is the one which distinguishes natural acts from human acts which are tho-se where a human being takes part and with the expression of their will can do what are simply called “legal acts” or “legal transactions”.