Summary

The current importance of acknowledgements of an obligation is evident from the number and complexity of cases involving acknowledgements of an obligation that have underscored numerous practical and theoretical issues which have yet to be thoroughly debated and resolved. At the same time, a number of various documents are used to acknowledge obligations in day to day business, but their content, purpose and significance are often unclear. This article addresses the fundamental bases of acknowledgements of obligation as well as the primary problems in this area of law.

The Supreme Court has identified two categories of acknowledgement of obligation: declarative and constitutive. This article focuses solely on abstract (constitutive) acknowledgements of obligation with only general reference to causal (declarative) acknowledgements of obligation. The author also looks at the unilateral acknowledgement by a debtor of an obligation that does not arise from a legal transaction, a subcategory of acknowledgement of obligation that has yet to be discovered on the Estonian legal landscape.

As the legal regulation of acknowledgements of obligation in the Estonian Law of Obligations is based on the German Civil Code, the author bases his analysis on Estonian Supreme Court practice and German legal literature.