A Survey on Unilateral Obligations of Bequest

Bequest is considered among the general powers of disposition a person jots down before his/her death. Thus, it is compared to the fulfilled properties a person might have possessed during his/her lifetime. According to the custom and practice, a hidden mercy lies in the interior of this legal identity. Mercy is antonym to the word hostility which means doing or not doing an arbitrary action that deserves appraisal and it is taken for granted that the legator has bestowed the position because of his mercy in the time of composing his bequest. In other words, taking possession of the legated property after the legator’s death has been intended by the legator merely by the time of composing the bequest initially and may not be continuous. By taking a look at the jurisprudential background of legacy law and comparing it with the ruling civil law of the present legal system, we come across disagreements with respect to the nature a contract or a unilateral obligation of the above mentioned identity has, namely regarding ownership legacy, which has been utilized in the present civil law unchangeably. Thus, to frame the legal structure of this law, some experts and scholars have considered it as a contract, while others believe it to be a unilateral obligation. Evidently, offer vs. acceptance is an issue which is discussed under contracts, and acceptance would not be positioned in the structure of unilateral obligations as the legal structure devised in the present legal system would be different with respect to contract and unilateral obligation and the ruling government adopts the rules which are considered as general and clear. However legacy law contains regulations and rules which contradicts the general rules in some cases and the ruling conventional system over the contracts entails that legacy, either ownership legacy or pledge is considered as being unilateral obligation. Therefore, the present paper attempts to investigate the jurisprudential background of this law along with the set-out reasons by comparing it with the civil law which has not been paved by many. The authors of the paper will compare legacy with the general rules of contracts and will substantiate why complex concept of legacy rests on being unilateral obligation.