LEGAL ACT. - From the human act considered in the moral order is distinguished the legal act, which is any act that has legal relevance, or the document containing the ascertainment of a fact bearing on 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).
To the act, in the sense of a human action producing legal consequences, is opposed the juridical fact, which is any event to which the law attaches legal effects, that is, the birth, extinction or modification of a subjective right or of a legal duty, or of a personal status. The juridical fact as such can be independent of the human will (e.g., the birth or death of a person, the passage of a period of time, etc.); conversely, the human will can be an element that substantially determines the production of the legal effect. In the first case we have the juridical fact in the strict sense; in the second case we have the legal act. The difference between the two categories lies purely in whether or not the will of man is the element envisaged by the law for attaching to it determinate legal effects. There are in reality voluntary acts of man that are facts, not legal acts, because the law attaches the legal effects purely to the material fact produced by the human will, independently of any will directed at obtaining them. For example, if death were willed by a man who aims through it to obtain determinate effects for his own heirs, such a will would be juridically irrelevant because the law connects the legal effects to the event of death as such and not to the will of man. In the legal act the human will is sometimes required to be enduring, so that the legal effect is recognized as long as that state of will persists (e.g., in Roman marriage); far more frequent, however, are voluntary facts in which an initial act of will suffices for the law to attribute legal effects to them, and it is to this category that the term legal act should be reserved.
Legal acts can be classified on the basis of various criteria. They can thus be distinguished in the first place into lawful and unlawful acts: the latter are acts forbidden by law; the former are all the others. Unlawful acts are then called crimes if they are punished by the criminal law, that is, if a penalty is prescribed against those who commit them. Lawful acts are called, according to a recent terminology, obligatory or compulsory acts, when omitting them is forbidden.
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., renunciation of a right made jointly by several holders of it); bilateral, on the other hand, are those acts in which several subjects act in two opposed but convergent directions (e.g., a contract); complex acts (whose notion, however, varies greatly among writers) would be those in which to the activity of the principal subject or subjects (parties) is added that of another subject, public or private, in the form of assent, approval, confirmation and the like.
A further distinction is that between acts inter vivos, or among the living, and acts mortis causa, according as they are destined to produce their effects during the life of the author or authors of the act or in any case independently of their death (marriage, contract, etc.), or only after the death of the author or of one of the subjects taking part in the act (e.g., a will).
Formal or solemn acts are those that cannot be validly performed except in one or more forms established by law; non-formal acts are those for which the law establishes no determinate form, and which can therefore be validly performed in any suitable form.
According to the subject of the act, public acts are distinguished from private ones: the former have as their author (at least one, if the authors are several) a public authority acting as such, and, according to the nature of that authority and the content of the act, they are in turn subdivided into legislative, administrative, and judicial or jurisdictional acts; private acts are those whose subjects are all private, or, if they involve subjects invested with public authority, those in which these act as private persons.
Besides these distinctions, common to every legal system, there are some proper to canon law. In it, for example, public acts can be distinguished into acts of the power of order 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 can be subdivided into legislative, administrative, and judicial acts.
Fundamental, moreover, especially in civil law, is the distinction, not always however adopted with a constant meaning, between legal acts in the strict sense and juridical transactions. For this, as also for what concerns the requirements (elements) of legal acts, v. NEGOZIO GIURIDICO.
For the distinction between acts of ordinary administration and acts exceeding ordinary administration, v. AMMINISTRAZIONE (atti di).
Pio Ciprotti