Legal relationship

A legal relationship or legal relation is a legal connection between two persons or other 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. Legal relationships often imply rights and obligations. Examples of legal relationships include contracts, marriage, and citizenship. As with other fundamental legal concepts, many different ways of defining and classifying legal relationships have been put forward.

Being able to enter into legal relations is a defining characteristic of legal personhood. For example, prior to the abolition of coverture in the United States and United Kingdom, married women lacked the ability to enter into legal relations. The same was true of enslaved people under various forms of slavery, including in ancient Rome and the United States before 1865. The connection between legal personhood and the ability to enter into legal relations, or particularly the ability to have legal rights, first emerged in Renaissance humanism and was later developed by civil law scholars such as Carl von Savigny.

In the civil law tradition, the concept of a legal bond (iuris vinculum) was used in the Institutes of Justinian to define an obligation as "a legal bond, with which we are bound by a necessity of performing some act according to the laws of our state." The metaphor of the "legal bond", also translated as "legal shackle" or "legal chain", remains fundamental to the law of obligations.

In common law jurisdictions, to create a contractual relationship, three elements are necessary: offer and acceptance, consideration and the intention to create legal relations. Because of this third requirement, an agreement may be unenforceable if a court believes that reasonable people would not have intended it to be legally binding, such as is often the case in social arrangements and domestic arrangements.