Art. 4656.Each Defendant Both Plaintiff and Defendant; No Responsive Pleadings to Answer; No Default Required

Article 4656 states the mechanic that makes a concursus proceeding work the way it does. Because every impleaded claimant is fighting over the same fund or property rather than defending against a claim made by the party who filed suit, the Code recasts each claimant's role toward the others: each one is considered both a plaintiff, asserting its own claim to the fund, and a defendant, resisting the claims the other parties assert.

Flowing from that dual role, no claimant has to file an exception or a responsive pleading to another claimant's answer. Every fact alleged in one defendant's answer is treated as denied or avoided by operation of law as to all the other parties, without anyone having to say so on paper. That mirrors the automatic-denial approach Article 852 applies to pleadings generally, adapted here to a case where every party stands opposite every other party at once.

The same logic explains why a defendant's silence does not trigger a default judgment. In an ordinary lawsuit, an unanswered petition can lead to a default against the defendant; in a concursus, a claimant who never answers is not defaulting on a claim asserted against it by the plaintiff so much as declining to press its own claim to the fund. Article 4656 dispenses with the default mechanism accordingly, leaving Article 4657 to spell out what happens to a claimant who stays silent.