Legal transaction
A legal transaction or transactional act (
The concept is a product of German jurisprudence and was developed as an alternative to the French-based dualism between legal fact vs. legal act.[citation needed] German legal theory rejects the notion of the legal fact (juristische Tatsache, Rechtstatsache, Latin factum iuridicum); thus, there is only the legal act (Rechtshandlung, Latin actus iuridicus), which is divided into lawful and unlawful legal acts. Of the three types of lawful acts (i.e. transactional, quasi-transactional, and de facto acts), the transactional act is the main category.
A transactional act is any voluntary manifestation of intention that creates the legal effects that the actor(s) specifically intended to bring about. Transactional acts include most of the unilateral and multilateral acts that are contemplated by the law. The main types are:
- Verpflichtungsgeschäft - constitutive transaction, i.e. any act that creates (or ‘constitutes’) an obligation
- Verfügungsgeschäft - dispositive transaction, i.e. any act that either transfers or extinguishes (or ‘disposes of’) an obligation
- examples: conveyance, assignment, delivery (of a movable), encumbrance, debt release or cancellation
- Gestaltungsgeschäft - potestative transaction, i.e. any unilateral act that creates a new potestative right (Gestaltungsrecht), or modifies and/or abolishes an existing legal relationship
- examples: rescission, will contest, giving notice (of quitting a job), letting a statute of limitations run out, abandonment (of property, etc.)
A transactional act can be distinguished from the other lawful legal acts, i.e. the quasi-transactional act (rechtsgeschäftsähnliche Handlung) and the de facto act (Realakt). The quasi-transactional act, though voluntary and intended, brings about legal effects that are not necessarily intended or sought out. The most obvious examples are
Notes
- ^ Jaap Hage, “What is a Legal Transaction?”, in Law as Institutional Normative Order, eds. Maksymilian Del Mar & Zenon Bankowski (Edinburgh: Ashgate, 2013), 103.
References
- Reinhard Bork. Allgemeiner Teil des Bürgerlichen Gesetzbuchs, 2nd edn. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006, pp 112–5.
- Werner Flume. Allgemeiner Teil des Bürgerlichen Rechts, vol. 2: Das Rechtsgeschäft. Berlin: Springer, 1992.
- Gerhard Lippe, Jörn Esemann, & Thomas Tänzer. “Lehre vom Rechtsgeschäft”, chap. 2 of Das Wissen für Bankkaufleute. Wiesbaden: Gabler, 1998, pp. 19–76.