We explain what legal relationships are, their elements, types, and other characteristics. In addition, the tax legal relationship.
What are legal relationships?
Legal relations are called the legal link between two or more legal subjects, according to which it is possible that one requires the other to comply with certain terms agreed upon or established in the Law. It can also be seen as the legal correlate of social relations, that is, the legal regulation that controls them and gives 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 whole society. These obligations may also be reciprocal, as in the case of a sale.
For that reason, legal relationships are the result of mandatory sources, that is, contracts or similar agreements before the law that are capable of promoting a mandatory condition, although it also does the crime, for example.
Characteristics of legal relationships
The main feature of legal relations is that they take place between subjects, never between subjects and objects (as is the case with de facto relations).
There are even those who consider them a name for their own normative assumption of law, that is, for the law itself, which obliges legal subjects to fulfill their duties while protecting their rights. From the point of view of the owner or subject, legal relations are called subjective rights, and can therefore be of two types: political and civil.
On the other hand, legal relationships can be of two types: public or private, depending on their purpose, in the same way, that private law can be commonly distinguished from public law.
Elements of legal relations
Legal relationships operate based on four basic or fundamental elements, which are:
- The creditor or active subject has the right to demand the fulfillment of an obligation, whether paid or otherwise.
- The debtor or taxpayer is the person required by law to comply with a prior agreement or to act in a certain way.
- The benefit object, is a legally regulated activity, such as giving something in possession, giving something in property, doing or not doing, etc.
- The legal link or attribution link is the same enshrined in the Law and allows the creditor to demand from the debtor the fulfillment of a specific action.
Types of legal relationships
According to its content, a distinction is generally made between four types of legal relationships:
- Mandatory relations. Those in which it deprives the duty to fulfill the rights of another subject (s), such as the return of a loan to the bank.
- Legal and real relationships. Those that indicate the right of the owner to dispose of his property in the way that best suits him, such as the right to sell or lease.
- Family relationships. Those who seek to guarantee the rights of the family institution, such as the right to food.
- Hereditary or inheritance relationships. Those that concern the successors of a deceased person, such as compliance with wills.
Legal relationship and legal link
The fundamental difference between a legal relationship and a legal link in many cases lies in the tradition of legal interpretation that is preferred. In some cases, the legal relationship is established as what binds the creditor and debtor, which comes from Roman law as Justinian or considered:
” Obligatio est iuris vinculum, what do you need adstringimur alicuius solvendae rei secundum nostrae civilitatis iura ” (“Obligation is a right link, 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 link as an independent element of the subjects, placed at the same level. As will be seen, it is a distinction rather than a semantic type.
Tax Legal Relationship
This type of legal relationship is understood as the one that exists between the treasury, acting as an active subject, and those taxpayers of the company that, by law, are designated as taxpayers, and that allows the former to demand tribute from them, or that is, the payment of the corresponding taxes.
In that sense, it is a legal relationship between the State and taxpayers, based on the regulations that regulate the tax participation of citizens, imposing positive and negative obligations, as well as rights.
