Private law regulates relationships between individuals.
Private law is that which is responsible for regulating relationships between individuals , which are raised in their own name and benefit. It is a branch of law made up of civil law and commercial law , among others.
Civil law regulates the private relations of citizens among themselves, usually to protect the interests of the person in the moral and patrimonial order. Commercial law or commercial law, for its part, deals with the regulation of relationships linked to people, acts, places and commercial contracts.
Private law vs. public law
Private law can be opposed, for analytical purposes, to public law , which studies the legal order of the links between citizens and public power, and between the different public power bodies among themselves.
In any case, it is important to keep in mind that, beyond governing relations between individuals, private law also regulates relations between citizens and the State in cases where the latter acts as an individual and does not exercise its public power.
It is common for private law to be opposed to public law for analytical purposes.
Main differences
The separation between private law and public law has been disappearing over time, especially since the public administration began to outsource several of its activities to companies subject to private law. However, certain characteristics of each of them can still be noted.
The fundamental principles of private law are autonomy of will (each of the parties pursues their own interests) and the principle of equality (the subjects of law are on an equal footing within the framework of private acts).
When the most important subject in a relationship is the State, we speak of public and private law if it is a private person ; This is recorded in the theory of interest developed by Ulpiano, which is considered one of the most classic and solid.
In any case, this theory is not completely accepted since it is considered that it seems to refer to economic goods and, clearly, they are not the only ones that exist; Furthermore, in many cases public and private interests are not clearly delimited, so this theory could not contribute to the clarification of a situation framed in this situation.
Theories about public law
Due to these contradictions, other theories have emerged over time, some of them are:
* The theory of the end : expresses that public law takes place when it comes to regulating the structure or functioning of some State body and its relationships and private law when what must be regulated is the relationship between individuals.
* The theory of the subject or recipient of the property right : it is more specific than the previous ones and is based on various types of property and the subject who is the owner of them. The classes are called: public property (the owner is the State and the public right is derived from it), collective property (the owner is the entire community and the collective right is derived from it) and private property (the owner is an individual. and private law emerges from it).
There are other theories, however these are the most relevant. Finally, it is worth mentioning that civil law is also understood as private law, that is, that which contemplates certain individual principles such as property and family relations and that regulates the most general and ordinary issues of life.