is a type of sale, and therefore it takes the same ruling: neither party may dissolve it without the consent of the other—unless a defect appears that the lessee did not know about when the contract was concluded, in which case he may annul it.

The lessor is obliged to hand the leased property over to the lessee and enable him to benefit from it. If he leases something to him but then prevents him from using it for all or part of the agreed period, he is entitled to no rent, or at most only a proportionate share, because he has not delivered what the lease encompasses. Conversely, once the lessee has been given access to the benefit but chooses not to avail himself of it for all or part of the period, he must still pay the full rent, for the lease is a binding contract whose legal consequence is that the rent belongs to the lessor while the usufruct belongs to the lessee.

A lease is terminated in the following cases:

1. The leased item perishes—for example, livestock rented for transport die, a house collapses, or farmland hired for cultivation loses its irrigation water.

2. The purpose for which the lease was concluded ceases—for instance, someone hires a physician to treat him and then recovers, making it impossible to obtain the contracted benefit.

If a person is hired to perform a task and then falls ill, he must, at his own expense, appoint someone to carry out the work on his behalf—unless it was stipulated that he perform the task personally, for the intended benefit might not be achieved through someone else’s expertise. In that case, the hiring party is not obliged to accept a substitute; rather, he may choose either to wait until the worker recovers or to rescind the contract because his right cannot otherwise be realized.

Laborers fall into two categories:

private and shared. A private laborer is one who