Forgo

Forgo is the origin case for renvoi, and it is the one the examiner expects first when the question asks what renvoi is. It is also the cleanest illustration of the machinery of partial (single) renvoi: the forum reads the foreign conflicts rule once, accepts where it points, and stops.

The case earns its place for a second reason. Its result is unattractive — the claimants got nothing and the State took the estate — which makes it the standard counterweight to the claim that renvoi serves the reasonable expectations of the parties.

Forgo was an illegitimate Bavarian national with a Bavarian domicile of origin. He lived most of his life in France, but never acquired a French domicile in the French sense, because French law imposed formal requirements he had not satisfied.

He died leaving movables in France and no relatives except remote collaterals of his mother. Those collaterals could not succeed under French internal law, but could succeed under Bavarian law. If they could not succeed, the property was ownerless and passed to the French State.

The French court applied French internal law, and the collaterals took nothing.

The steps are worth memorising in order, because every renvoi problem runs on the same rails.

Step one — the forum's own conflicts rule. French private international law referred succession to the lex patriae, the law of the nationality: Bavarian law.

Step two — read the reference in the wide sense. The court did not stop at Bavarian internal law. It read the reference to "Bavarian law" as including Bavarian conflicts rules. That decision is the whole of renvoi: a reference to a foreign law is either to its internal rules only, or to the whole of it including its choice-of-law rules, and the doctrine exists only because the second reading is taken.

Step three — follow the foreign conflicts rule. Bavarian conflicts law referred intestate succession to movables to the lex situs — the law of the place where the movables were — which was France. That is a remission, a reference back to the forum. (Had it pointed to a third country it would have been a transmission.)

Step four — accept the reference back and stop. The French court accepted the remission and applied French internal law. It did not ask what a Bavarian judge would have done with the French reference back; that further question is the mark of total renvoi, not this doctrine. Single renvoi involves one look at the foreign conflicts rules, producing either transmission to another system or remission to the forum's law.

The consequence. French internal law did not let remote maternal collaterals succeed, so they took nothing and the estate went to the French State.

It opens: What is renvoi? Explain with cases — and it is the first case to cite for partial or single renvoi.

Pair it with Re Ross, which runs the identical machinery and produces the opposite outcome: a British national domiciled in Italy died leaving a will valid by English law but invalid by Italian law; English conflicts law referred to the domicile, Italy; Italian conflicts law referred to the nationality, England; the English court accepted the remission and upheld the will. The pairing proves the examinable point that the doctrine has no inherent tendency — in Forgo the reference back deprived the claimants, in Re Ross it saved the will, and the results depend entirely on the content of the two internal laws.

Contrast it with total renvoi, where the court makes an imaginary journey to the foreign land and asks what a judge there would do, and where Collier v. Rivaz and Re Annesley reach opposite results for reasons that lie in French and Belgian doctrine rather than in English law.

In the evaluation essay, use Forgo to test the argument in favour of renvoi. The doctrine is defended as promoting the reasonable expectations of the parties; the outcome here, where the estate escheated because two systems each pointed away from themselves, sits badly with that defence — as does the concession this course records, that it "is difficult to imagine how the same could have been said of the result in Re O'Keefe".

It does not decide: anything about renvoi in contract, where the doctrine is excluded — for India, NTPC v. Singer Company holds that the proper law means the substantive principles of the chosen domestic system, not its conflict of laws rules. Nor does it commit any system to the wide reading of a reference to foreign law; that reading is a choice the forum makes, and it is the choice that the whole debate is about.