Legal relationship

A legal relationship or legal relation is a legal connection between two persons or entities. It may also be known, particularly in the law of India, as a jural relationship. A legal relationship may exist, for example, between two individuals or between an individual and a government. Examples of legal relationships include contracts, marriage, and citizenship.

A systematic theory of legal relations was put forward by the US legal scholar Wesley Hohfeld in 1913 and remains widely influential. In Hohfeld's framework, there are four types of legal relations (or "jural correlatives"): right and duty; privilege and no-right; power and liability; and immunity and disability. In each case, one person has the first position and another person has the second position. If someone has a "right" under Hohfeld's system, someone else has a duty to act in accordance with that right. If someone has a "privilege" to do something, someone else has a "no-right", because they have no right to stop the first person from acting. Someone with a "power" can change a legal relation of someone else, who has a "liability". Someone with an immunity cannot have a given legal relation changed by someone else, and that second person has a disability. Thus, for example, in contract law, a plaintiff's failure to mitigate damages gives the defendant a privilege not to pay damages. Although originally intended to describe legal relations in private law, Hohfeld's framework has been extended to constitutional law, notably by the German scholar Robert Alexy.

To create a contract, in common law jurisdictions, three elements are necessary: offer and acceptance, consideration and the intention to create legal relations. Thus, an agreement may be unenforceable if a court believes that reasonable people would not have intended the agreement to be legally binding, such as is often the case in social arrangements and domestic arrangements.

Characteristics of legal relations

1. Social relations arise only between people and their associations and are directly related to their activities and behavior.
2. Ideological relations pass through the minds of people, where a model of future relations is formed because of existing universal values and social priorities.
3. Legal relations act as a legal expression of economic, political, family, and other relations.
4. Legal relations arise, cease or change based on legal norms that affect people's behavior and are implemented through it.
5. The subjects of legal relations are interconnected by subjective rights and legal obligations. The parties in legal relations act as authorized and obligated persons, where the rights and interests of some persons can be realized through the performance of duties by others.
6. The mutual behavior of participants in legal relations is individualized and clearly defined. The subjects of legal relations (government agencies, individuals, or legal entities), as a rule, are known in advance, their actions are coordinated before the beginning of these relations, which is not the case in other social relations.
7. The volitional nature of legal relations is because they arise and are realized based on the will of at least one of their participants, necessarily passing through their consciousness and expressing their will.
8. Legal relations are protected by the state.

Bibliography

• Hart, H.L.A., 1961, The Concept of Law, chapter 3, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Kelly, J.M. (1992). A Short History of Western Legal Theory. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-876244-7.
• Weber, Max (1964). The Theory of Social and Economic Organization (Edited with Introduction by Talcott Parsons – Translated in English by A. M. Henderson). The Free Press of Glencoe. ASIN B-000-LRHAX-2.
• Marmor, Andrei (1934). "The Pure Theory of Law". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved 9 February 2007.