Say the ratio out loud before you open Reasoning — recalling it unprompted is exactly what the exam pays for.
Why it matters
It is the origin case for total or double renvoi, also called the foreign court theory. Where partial renvoi reads the foreign conflicts rule once, total renvoi asks a harder question: what would a judge sitting in the foreign country actually do with this case? This is the first of the two cases that must be learnt as a contrasting pair.
Facts
A British subject died domiciled in Belgium, leaving a will that was valid by English law but not valid by Belgian law.
Held
The English court tested the validity of the will by English law and upheld it.
Reasoning
Step one — the forum's rule points abroad. English conflicts law referred testamentary validity to the law of the domicile, Belgium.
Step two — sit, in imagination, in the foreign court. The doctrine requires the English judge, referred by his own law to a foreign system, to apply whatever law a court in that country would apply if it were hearing the case. The image the course uses is exact: the judge makes an imaginary journey to the country of the lex causae and sits in its court.
Step three — find what the Belgian judge would have done. A Belgian court would have applied English law, as the law of the testator's nationality.
Step four — do the same. The English court therefore applied English law, and the will stood.
Exam use
It opens: Explain total or double renvoi — but never alone. It must be paired with Re Annesley, which runs identical machinery and reaches the opposite result.
State the examinable contrast precisely. The difference between the two cases lies not in English law but in the foreign system's own attitude to renvoi. In Re Annesley France accepted the reference back, so a French judge would have applied French internal law and the English judge did the same. Had France refused it, English internal law would have applied. Under total renvoi, therefore, the result in England turns on a question of foreign doctrine that must be proved by expert evidence.
Carry the decisive objection into the evaluation essay. Total renvoi can in practice be operated by only one country, because if the lex causae used it too there would be no way out of the revolving door. A doctrine whose stated virtue is uniformity works only so long as it remains unilateral.
It does not decide that the wide reading of a reference to foreign law is compulsory; that reading is a choice the forum makes, and modern instruments exclude it for contracts.