Understanding Legal Obligations: Definitions, Types, and Extinction
Duties
A duty is a link whereby we give, do, or do not do something.
Elements of a Legal Obligation
- Subject: Persons involved in the legal relationship: the active subject (creditor) and the passive subject (debtor).
- Purpose: The specific action to be fulfilled by the debtor to the creditor.
- Cause: The reason why a person is obliged to another.
Sources of Legal Obligations
- Contract: When several people agree on a common declaration of willingness to establish rules for their rights.
- Quasi-contract: A lawful, voluntary act that, without a covenant, creates obligations.
- Crime: A wrongful act causing damage, done intentionally.
- Unintentional Tort: An illicit action that causes harm but has been executed without intent to harm.
- Law: Obligations emanating from legal authority.
Effects of Obligations
Regarding the Creditor
- May use legal means to ensure the debtor fulfills the obligation.
- May seek another party to fulfill the obligation at the debtor’s expense.
- May obtain compensation from the debtor.
Requirements for Debtor’s Liability for Damages
- The creditor must be in default by notice.
- The delay must be attributable to the debtor (excluding force majeure).
- The delay must have caused damages.
Regarding the Debtor
- Is responsible for complying with the obligation.
- May obtain the corresponding release upon fulfillment.
- May repel actions of the creditor after fulfillment.
Classification of Obligations
- Civil and Natural: Civil obligations entitle legal enforcement, while natural obligations do not confer the right to demand compliance.
- Principal and Accessory: Principal obligations have independent existence, while accessory obligations depend on another obligation.
- To Give, To Do, Not To Do: Obligations to deliver a thing, to perform an action, or to abstain from performing a particular act.
- Alternative, Optional, and Conjunctive: Obligations involving one of several benefits, a given service, or compliance with several benefits, respectively.
- Divisible and Indivisible: Obligations susceptible to partial fulfillment or those that can only be fulfilled in their entirety.
- Joint or Several: Obligations where, despite recognizing several creditors/debtors, each creditor/debtor can be sued for the entirety of the obligation.
Modalities of Obligations
- Condition: The acquisition or extinction of a right depends on a future and uncertain event. It can be suspensive (birth of a right) or resolutory (extinction of a right).
- Term: The exercise of a right is subject to a period of time. It can be certain (fixed date) or uncertain (an event that will happen, but the timing is uncertain).
- Burden: A duty charged when enforcing an outstanding obligation to the purchaser of a right.
Forms of Extinction of Obligations
- Payment: Fulfillment of the obligation. Payment can be made by a third party through subrogation (conventional or legal).
- Novation: Transformation of an obligation into another. It is not presumed.
- Compensation: When two people, by their own right, are both creditor and debtor to each other.
- Transaction: A bilateral legal act where parties extinguish litigated or questionable obligations. It can be judicial (before a judge) or conventional (between the parties).
- Confusion: When the same person becomes both creditor and debtor.
- Renunciation: A bilateral legal act where the creditor declines the fulfillment of the obligation.
- Debt Remission: A form of renunciation where the creditor voluntarily surrenders the original document comprising the debt to the debtor.
- Inability to Pay: When compliance has become legally or materially impossible.
- Prescription: Extinction of an obligation due to the passage of time.