Law of obligations

The law of obligations is one branch of private law under the civil law legal system and so-called "mixed" legal systems. It is the body of rules that organizes and regulates the rights and duties arising between individuals. The specific rights and duties are referred to as obligations, and this area of law deals with their creation, effects and extinction.

An obligation is a legal bond (vinculum iuris) by which one or more parties (obligants) are bound to act or refrain from acting. An obligation thus imposes on the obligor a duty to perform, and simultaneously creates a corresponding right to demand performance by the obligee to whom performance is to be tendered.

The word originally derives from the Latin "obligare" which comes from the root "lig" which suggests being bound, as one is to God for instance in "re-ligio". This term first appears in Plautus' play Truculentus at line 214.

Obligations did not originally form part of Roman Law, which mostly concerned issues of succession, property, and family relationships. It developed as a solution to a gap in the system, when one party committed a wrong against another party. These situations were originally governed by a basic customary law of revenge. This undesirable situation eventually evolved into a system of liability in which people were initially encouraged and later essentially compelled to accept monetary compensation from the wrongdoer or their family instead of seeking vengeance. This marked an important shift in the law from vengeance toward compensation. The state supported this effort by standardizing amounts for certain wrongs. Thus the earliest form of Obligation law derives out of what we would today call Delict.

However, liability in this form did not yet include the idea that the debtor "owed" monetary compensation to the creditor, it was merely a means of avoiding punishment. If the debtor or his family didn't have the means to pay then the old rules still applied as outlined in the Twelve Tables, specifically Table III. This section, despite how harsh it may appear to us, was originally developed as a means to protect debtors from the excessive abuses of creditors.

Justinian first defines an obligation (obligatio) in his Institutes, Book 3, section 13 as "a legal bond, with which we are bound by necessity of performing some act according to the laws of our State." He further separates the law of obligations into contracts, delicts, quasi-contracts, and quasi-delicts.

Nowadays, obligation, as applied under civilian law, means a legal tie (vinculum iuris) by which one or more parties (obligants) are bound to perform or refrain from performing specified conduct (prestation). Thus an obligation encompasses both sides of the equation, both the obligor's duty to render prestation and the obligee's right to receive prestation. It differs from the common-law concept of obligation which only encompasses the duty aspect.

Every obligation has four essential requisites otherwise known as the elements of obligation. They are: