Definition
In Spanish law, condonación is the remission or forgiveness of a debt by a creditor, releasing the debtor from the obligation to pay. The release may be accomplished either expressly (by explicit declaration or agreement) or tacitly (by conduct that implies the creditor has relinquished the claim, such as voluntarily surrendering the instrument of debt). The doctrine operates as an act of liberality — a unilateral or bilateral act by which the creditor extinguishes an existing obligation without receiving satisfaction of it.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): "Condonación" is the Spanish-language noun form of "condonar," meaning to condone, pardon, or forgive — used in everyday Spanish to describe overlooking wrongdoing or canceling a penalty.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Webster's 1913 does not carry a separate entry for "condonación" as an English term, reflecting its status as a term of art imported directly from Spanish civil law into American legal usage in jurisdictions with Spanish legal heritage.
The everyday sense of "condoning" something in English carries a moral connotation — tolerating misconduct. The legal term condonación is narrower and specifically commercial: it concerns the extinction of a debt obligation, not the pardon of wrongdoing. A researcher encountering the term in historical Southwest or Louisiana-adjacent documents should not read it as a moral forgiveness or as bearing any resemblance to the matrimonial doctrine of condonation in common law (see COMMON CONFUSION below).
Common Confusion
Condonación (Spanish civil law debt remission) should not be confused with condonation in common law matrimonial contexts. In common law, condonation historically referred to a spouse's forgiveness of a matrimonial offense — such as adultery — which, if proven, could bar a divorce action. The two terms share a Latin root and a general sense of forgiveness, but they operate in entirely different fields: one extinguishes a creditor's claim in contract or obligation law; the other operated as an affirmative defense in divorce proceedings. Historical sources do not always flag this distinction, and the phonetic similarity creates real research hazards when working across civil law and common law materials simultaneously.
Why It Matters in Research
Condonación is a term of Spanish civil law, not English common law, and its appearance in American legal sources is almost entirely confined to jurisdictions that inherited Spanish legal traditions — principally Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona, Louisiana (adjacent influence), and Florida. Researchers working in pre-statehood or early post-statehood records from these jurisdictions will encounter it in land grant disputes, commercial obligation cases, and probate records where Spanish-law doctrines continued to govern transactions entered into before American acquisition.
The critical research trap is jurisdictional translation: American courts in the nineteenth century frequently had to determine how condonación mapped onto common law equivalents — whether it resembled release, accord and satisfaction, or gift. The answer was not always consistent, and courts sometimes imported the term without fully applying Spanish civil law doctrine. Bouvier's citation to 14 American Law Register 641 is a useful pointer to period scholarship wrestling with exactly this translation problem.
Researchers should also note that tacit condonación — remission implied by conduct rather than stated — creates evidentiary challenges in historical sources. A creditor's surrender of a promissory note, failure to pursue a claim, or written acknowledgment might each be read as tacit remission, but historical records do not always label the act as condonación even when the legal effect was the same.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three source dictionaries — Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Bouvier's — give virtually identical definitions: remission of a debt, expressly or tacitly, under Spanish law. The uniformity across sources reflects that this is a received civil law doctrine being catalogued for reference rather than a term whose meaning was actively contested in American courts. None of the dictionaries elaborate on the mechanics — what conduct qualifies as tacit remission, whether acceptance by the debtor was required, or how condonación interacted with the rights of sureties or co-obligors. These are substantive gaps for any researcher who needs more than a thumbnail definition. Bouvier alone provides a secondary source pointer (14 Am. L. Reg. 641), making it the most useful of the three for follow-up research. Black's adds nothing beyond the bare definition across both editions.
Jurisdictional Note
Condonación applies only where Spanish civil law tradition has legal force or historical relevance. In the American context, this means pre-statehood and transitional-period records in the former Spanish and Mexican territories. Modern civil law jurisdictions outside the United States — Mexico, Spain, and other Spanish-speaking countries — continue to use the concept in their civil codes, though terminology and formal requirements vary.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Spanish Civil Law
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Debt and Obligation
See Law Mind Encyclopedia — Release and Discharge of Contracts