Rescission[1]​ is a concept that refers to the legal transaction by which a business, contract or legal act is left without effect, by means of a judicial declaration. Also known as the action for annulment of contracts or legal transactions, and in notarial law, as a pro forma action.

It is understood mainly with respect to contracts, businesses or legal acts that are affected by relative nullity, of which in the majority of Anglo-Saxon legislation, only the person in whose favor it has been established is allowed to attempt, unless this is the one that reports benefit or enrichment. Consequently, rescission is not established in the interest of morality and the law. It does not protect the higher interests of the community, but rather those of certain and specific people, for whose benefit the legislator establishes it.[2]​.

Some legal systems consider it as one of the ways to extinguish obligations, such as the Chilean and Salvadoran Civil Codes.

It is the civil sanction imposed on acts executed or celebrated regardless of a requirement required by law for the value of a legal act, taking into account the quality or state of the parties that execute or celebrate it.[3]​.

There are three types of termination:

Voluntary: must be pending compliance and done by mutual consent of the parties.

Judicial: due to property damage or damage suffered, which will have a consequence issued in a ruling by a judicial body. For it to proceed, the termination must necessarily be declared by a jurisdictional body, which will hear and rule at the request of the interested party.

Fortuitous: occurs as a result of circumstances beyond the control of the obligor due to forced circumstances in which compliance with the obligation becomes impossible (death of one of the partners, death of the agents, and in the event that the heirs do not wish to maintain the obligation, resignation for just cause). In this case, however, one cannot properly speak of rescission, since the same does not necessarily imply the nullity of the contract, but rather the extinction of the obligation.