Legal Question in Family Law in California

Not if the debt was incurred before your relationship/marriage.

Ms. Karnazes is partially correct. You would not be personally liable, however your spouse's share of any community property would be subject to collection to satisfy the debt. So, for example, the spouse has $100,000 in student loans. Over the course of the marriage the spouse pays down $25,000. In the same period the two of you are good savers and manage your savings well so after a few years you have $100,000 in a brokerage account and you manage to buy a home that has $200,000 in equity in it. Then they die with $75,000 left owing on the student loans. At that point, assuming the spouse has no other heirs, they die with an estate worth $150,000, that being the spouse's half of the community property stocks and half of the community property equity in the house, all of which you would inherit. BUT that estate would also include a separate property debt of $75,000. So the lender could take half the stocks, and then seek to recover the balance of $25,000 out of the equity in the house. At that point, you would probably have to liquidate $25,000 more of the stocks to pay off the loans, even though that would come out of your half of the community property, rather than sell the house to give them their balance out of the spouse's share of the equity, which is technically what they would have a right to.

Of course, far better than letting anything like that happen is simply to make sure your spouse has life insurance that will pay off any debts they will leave behind.