Codicil Form To Add To An Existing Will: Fill & Download for Free

Since in Louisiana a codicil to a testament has to be in one of the forms acceptable as a testament, the usual recommendation is to have the testament redrafted rather than the use of a codicil.

The Codicil to a Will is a document that’s added to an existing, signed will, to change it or add new provisions to it. The word codicil has been around since the 1400s, but now that most wills are created electronically, it's often easier -- and clearer -- just to make a new will.Both Wills and Codicils Require the Signatures of WitnessesWills, unlike most other legal documents, aren’t valid unless they are signed in front of two adult witnesses. The witnesses aren’t there just to make sure you’re who you say you are. They sign their own statement at the end of your will, declaring that you seemed of sound mind and not under undue influence—in other words, that it looked to them like you understood what you were signing and were acting of your own free will.This witness requirement for wills isn’t likely to go away anytime soon. Wills are simply different from other documents because if there’s a dispute over one, the key person—the one who signed it—won’t be around to explain what he or she meant. By contrast, if people are arguing about, say, a contract, both of them can go into court and do their best to convince a judge or jury of their point of view.A few states are chipping away at the witness requirement, by allowing people to sign in front of a notary public instead of witnesses, but it’s definitely the exception to the rule. After all, a notary public checks your driver’s license and verifies your identity, but isn’t asked to form any opinion about your mental state.How does this affect codicils? Because they are just like wills, witnesses are required for them, too. So if, after you make and sign your will, you want to add a new paragraph with a codicil, you’ll have to sign the codicil in front of two witnesses, just like the original will.Making a New Will Is Often as Easy as Making a CodicilMost of us will eventually want to change the first will we make. After all, circumstances change: we marry, divorce, have children, have spats with our relatives, take up and abandon charitable causes. One “last will” isn’t likely to carry us through to the end.The witness requirement, plus the ease of using computers to prepare, modify, and print documents, erase any reason to make a codicil. When legal documents were painstakingly written out with quill pens, it made sense not to rewrite a whole will if you could just tack on a brief codicil. But these days, there’s no advantage to a codicil.There is, however, a drawback: A codicil is unlikely to seamlessly fit with the original will. Is it a pure addition, or does it negate something in the original document? If it’s supposed to replace part of the first will, which part?The solution is simple: just make another will. These days, it's easy to start from scratch, using software or an online service. Or start with your original will, which is surely on a computer somewhere—in your home or office, if you prepared it yourself, in an online service’s files, or in your lawyer’s office if you hired someone to prepare it. (Lawyers don’t use quills anymore, either.) If you can’t get your hands on the file, just retype it—carefully. And then get those two witnesses to watch you sign.

Kant’s philosophy is based on an idea of scientific progress that made sense in the 18th Century, but seems less satisfactory now.In the 17th Century, Descartes felt that the only really valuable thing he learned at university was mathematics, especially geometry. Euclid had established the axioms of geometry, and all that was left was to derive more and more theorems from those axioms.In other areas of science, nothing seemed certain. There were still Aristotelians trying to defend an out-dated view, and while there were many people able to point out the flaws in the Aristotelian view, nobody had come up with a comprehensive view of the universe and its working and figured out all the details.By the time of Kant, Newton’s paradigm had displaced that of Aristotle. It was natural for Kant to assume that Newton had done for physics what Euclid had done for geometry, and that future work in physics would simply build on Newton’s foundations, filling in more and more details about the universe, but based on the idea that the universe is governed by Newton’s laws.(We all know what happened next. Lobachevsky and others discovered alternatives to Euclid’s geometry, and using non-Euclidean geometry, Einstein produced his theories of special and general relativity, revealing that Newton’s system is only an approximation to the truth. So we are now less inclined to think that scientific progress means you are building on foundations that have been definitively established and will never need revision).Hume set out to show that all of our beliefs are derived from experience alone. Hume thought that we can have certainty about our own ideas, and when we study arithmetic and geometry (thought Hume) we are just studying ideas that exist in our minds. But when it comes to matters of fact - statements about the world we live in - we cannot have certainty, particularly not when we make universal statements.Kant realized that if Hume’s empiricist account of knowledge is correct, then we cannot really know Newton’s laws. Newtonian physics require us to suppose that we can rely on the truth of mathematics when making statements about the physical world. So Kant thinks that the scientist of his day is right to be confident that we know that Newton’s laws are true, but the empiricist philosopher cannot explain how we have this knowledge.(Anyone who has read Tyler Hook’s answer on this thread might suppose that I’m contradicting what he says, since he mentions Kant’s disagreement with Newton. But in fact, my answer should be read as complementary to his: I’ve been trying to describe the background which led Kant to espouse the theory that Tyler explains, and I’m about to introduce the disagreement with Newton that he mentions).Kant explains that Newton can give us knowledge about laws that govern the whole universe because, although Newton himself did not realize it, these laws govern the whole phenomenal universe. Everything that we ever can or will experience is part of the phenomenal universe, which is created as we impose the categories of our mind onto reality - and this is the only way in which any experience is possible. So (as with Hume), certain and universal knowledge is only possible when it is knowledge about our minds but since our minds impose themselves on every experience, this gives us knowledge about the whole of the universe that we experience. Newton failed to realize that time as we experience it is only a projection, but within the realm that we create by projecting our intuition of time, we can rely on Newton’s laws.This sets the pattern for “correlationism”, to borrow a term from Quentin Meillassoux. Meillassoux invented the word to describe a form of philosophy that begins with Kant and extends to the present day. Suppose a scientist says that some event, Y, occurred x number of years before humans existed:The correlationist will in no way intervene in the content of this statement … she will simply add - perhaps only to himself, but add it he will - something like a simple codicil, always the same one, which he will discretely append to the end of the phrase: event Y occurred x number of years before the emergence of humans for humans (or even, for the human scientist). This codicil is the codicil of modernity: the codicil through which the modern philosopher refrainds (or at least thinks she does) from intervening in the content of science, while preserving a regime of meaning external to and more originary than that of science.(Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude, trans. Ray Brassier, p.14). The widespread (but not universal) acceptance of correlationism in its various forms can be regarded as Kant’s legacy for philosophy of science.