Líneas históricas de la novación subjetiva por cambio de deudor con especial referencia al derecho castellano

Abstract

The Spanish Civil Code, partially following the French Civil Code (and the Italian one of 1865, which continued the code previously mentioned), regulates the change of the debtor's person as one of the possible applications of the novation: the subjective novation due to a change of the debtor's person, a concept having Roman origins, that, in this case, would mean the discharge of a liability with the release of the debtor and the emergence of a new liability taken over by the new debtor; one and the other casually related. Article 1156 of the Spanish Civil Code includes it as one of the possible ways of discharging liabilities, but in the more detailed regulation of articles 1203 et seq, appears rather as an assumption of modification than as a discharge of liabilities. Such a regulation and the modification-discharge tension which goes along with this institute is the product of the evolution undergone by it from the adoption of the Roman law on.