Short answer. Yes. Article 1646 extends the purchase disqualifications to leases. The same people who cannot buy certain property because of their position of trust — guardians, agents, executors, public officers, and court officials over things in litigation — are equally forbidden from becoming lessees of those same things.
What the law says
are also disqualified to become lessees of the things mentioned therein.
Civil Code, Article 1646 — Who Cannot Be a Lessee. Read the full provision →
The rule borrows the buyers' blacklist
Article 1646 does not draw up a fresh list of who may not lease. It reaches across to the persons already disqualified from buying and says they are also disqualified to become lessees of the things mentioned therein. So to know who cannot lease, you read the purchase prohibitions and apply the same names. The logic is identical in both settings: a person entrusted with someone else's property should not quietly turn that trust into a private acquisition, whether the acquisition takes the form of a sale or of a lease. Renaming the deal a lease does not launder the conflict of interest the law is guarding against.
Who is on the list
Article 1491 names the barred purchasers, and they carry over here. A guardian cannot take, over property under his guardianship. An agent cannot take property whose sale or administration was entrusted to him without the principal's consent. Executors and administrators cannot take estate property under administration. Public officers cannot take State or government property placed in their charge. And justices, judges, prosecutors, clerks and other officers connected with the administration of justice — and the lawyers appearing in the case — cannot take property in litigation before their court. Each of these persons is likewise barred from leasing the very same thing.
Why a lease is treated like a purchase
The disqualifications exist to remove the temptation to profit from a position of confidence, and a lease is fully capable of delivering that profit. A guardian who leases the ward's land to himself at a soft rent, or a lawyer who takes a lease over the property fought over in the case he is handling, gains an advantage from the trust reposed in him just as surely as a buyer would. Because the mischief is the same, the bar is the same. The article closes the obvious workaround of using a rental agreement to reach a benefit a direct sale would deny.
The edges of the prohibition
The bar is tied to the specific property connected to the person's role — it does not stop a guardian, agent or court officer from leasing property they have no fiduciary link to. Some of the prohibitions can be lifted by consent; an agent, for instance, may deal in the property where the principal agrees. The rule also fixes who is disqualified, not the precise consequence of a lease made in breach, which the law addresses elsewhere. And it does not touch the countless ordinary tenants who stand in no position of trust at all — they remain free to lease.