A testator can can revoke a testamentary provision in the following ways:
- Declaring the revocation in one of the forms prescribed for testaments.
- Making a subsequent incompatible testamentary disposition or provision.
- Making a subsequent inter vivos disposition of the thing that is the object of the legacy and not reacquiring the thing.
- Clearly revoking the provision or legacy by a signed writing on the testament itself.1
A testator's divorce from a legatee after the execution of the testament also revokes the legacy unless the testator has remarried the legatee following the divorce or the testament provides to the contrary. Testamentary designations or appointments of a spouse are revoked under the same circumstances.2
Revocation of legacies in an olographic will may also occur by physical destruction of the testament or by drawing lines through or erasing portions of it, provided that the lines or erasures were made by the hand of the testator.3
- 1La. C.C. art. 1608.
- 2Id.
- 3Oroszy v. Burkard, 158 So. 2d 405 (La. App. 3 Cir. 1953) (“[A] testator, by drawing lines through words or over some writing in his olographic will, may cancel portions of the will or he may revoke it in toto, provided that the evidence establishes that the lines were drawn by the hand of the testator and that in doing so the testator actually intended to cancel or revoke all or specific portions of the will.”).