ATTO GIURIDICO. — Distinct from the human act considered in the moral order is the juridical act, which is any act having juridical significance, or the document containing the ascertainment of a fact reflecting a right, as in the expressions “public act,” “private act,” “birth certificate,” “baptismal certificate,” etc. This twofold meaning is confirmed by the legislator’s use of the term act in both senses (e.g., cann. 2212 and 1990 of the CIC).
Opposed to the juridical act, in the sense of a human action productive of juridical consequences, is the juridical fact, which is any event to which the law attaches juridical effects, that is, the coming into being, extinction, or modification of a subjective right or a juridical duty, or of a personal status. The juridical fact as such may be independent of human will (e.g., the birth or death of a person, the passage of a period of time, etc.); conversely, human will may be an element that substantially determines the production of the juridical effect. In the first case we have the juridical fact in the strict sense; in the second, the juridical act. The difference between the two categories lies purely in whether or not human will is the element provided for by law as the basis for attaching determinate juridical effects to II. There are, in fact, voluntary human acts that are facts, not juridical acts, because the law attaches juridical effects purely to the material fact produced by human will, independently of any possible will directed toward obtaining them. For example, if death were willed by a person who sought through it to obtain determinate effects for his heirs, that will would be juridically irrelevant, because the law attaches the juridical effects to the event of death as such, and not to the person’s will. In the juridical act, human will is sometimes required to be enduring, so that the juridical effect is recognized as long as that state of will persists (e.g., in Roman marriage); much more frequent, however, are voluntary facts in which an initial act of will suffices for the law to attribute juridical effects to them, and it is to this category that the term juridical act should be reserved.
Juridical acts may be classified according to various criteria. Thus, one may distinguish first of all between lawful and unlawful acts: the latter are acts prohibited by law; the former are all others. Unlawful acts are then called offenses if they are punished by criminal law, that is, if a penalty is prescribed against whoever commits them. Lawful acts are called, according to recent terminology, acts required or obligatory when omitting them is prohibited.
Another important distinction is that between unilateral, bilateral, and complex acts. The first consist in the activity of a single subject (e.g., a will), or of several subjects acting in a single direction (e.g., the renunciation of a right made jointly by several persons holding it); bilateral acts, on the other hand, are those in which several subjects act in two opposed but converging directions (e.g., a contract); complex acts (although their notion varies considerably among writers) would be those in which the activity of another subject, public or private, is added to that of the principal subject or subjects (the parties), in the form of consent, approval, confirmation, or the like.
A further distinction is made between acts inter cœos, or inter vivos, and acts mortis causa, according as they are intended to produce their effects during the life of the author or authors of the act, or in any event independently of their death (marriage, contract, etc.), or only after the death of the author or of one of the subjects participating in the act (e.g., a will).
Acts are called formal or solemn when they cannot be validly performed except in one or more forms established by law; non-formal acts are those for which the law establishes no definite form and which may therefore be validly performed in any suitable form.
According to the subject of the act, public acts are distinguished from private acts: the former have as their author (at least one, if there are several authors) a public authority acting as such, and, according to the nature of that authority and the content of the act, are further subdivided into legislative, administrative, and judicial or jurisdictional acts; private acts are those whose subjects are all private persons, or, where the subjects are invested with public authority, those in which they act as private persons.
In addition to these distinctions, common to every juridical system, there are some proper to canon law. In it, for example, public acts may be distinguished into acts of the power of orders and acts of the power of jurisdiction; the latter, in turn, into acts of jurisdiction of the external forum and acts of jurisdiction of the internal forum; finally, those of the external forum may be subdivided into legislative, administrative, and judicial acts.
Fundamental, especially in civil law, is the distinction—though it is not always assigned a constant meaning—between juridical acts in the strict sense and juridical transactions. For this distinction, as well as for what concerns the requirements (elements) of juridical acts, V. NEGOZIO GIURIDICO.
For the distinction between acts of ordinary administration and acts exceeding ordinary administration, V. AMMINISTRAZIONE (atti di). Pio Ciprotti