Say the ratio out loud before you open Reasoning — recalling it unprompted is exactly what the exam pays for.
Why it matters
It supplies the module's organising principle — status is universal, its incidents are not — and it is the only case in the paper on the recognition of a foreign legitimation.
Facts
This course cites the case for the principles it states and does not set out the facts in full. The question concerned the recognition of a status acquired abroad and its effect on succession to immovable property.
Held
Three propositions.
On universality of status. The personal status of a man accompanies him everywhere, as does the status of domestic relations, on the principle of the universality of status recognised in all countries.
On recognition of a foreign legitimation. Quoting Graveson, the principle of universal recognition led the English courts to accept the status of a child legitimated under the law of a foreign domicile for many years before legitimation by the subsequent marriage of the child's parents was introduced into English law by the Legitimacy Act 1926. The connecting factor is the law of the foreign domicile.
On the incidents of status. Succession to immovable property is governed by the law of the place where the property is situate — but that law determines only who takes and in what shares; whether the claimant is a wife or a legitimate son is a question of status, determined by the law of the place of celebration or of domicile, and the lex situs must take that status as it finds it.
Reasoning
Step one — why status must travel. A marriage, a legitimation, an adoption is not located anywhere; it attaches to a person, and must travel with that person or it is worthless. A status that evaporates at a frontier is not a status.
Step two — why recognition can outrun domestic law. Recognition of a foreign status is not the same as having that institution at home. England recognised foreign legitimations long before it legitimated anyone itself, because the question was whether the status validly acquired elsewhere existed, not whether English law would have created it.
Step three — the line that decides cases. Recognising a status and giving it effect are two different operations governed by two different laws. The lex situs governs succession; it does not get to decide who is a legitimate son.
Exam use
It opens: Discuss legitimacy and legitimation in private international law — and it is one of only three points this course makes on the head.
Give the other two. Legitimacy arises as a preliminary question and shows its awkwardness at once: the domicile of origin of an illegitimate child is the mother's, which is artificial because the issue of legitimate status may itself depend on domicile; and whether a child is legitimate is referred to the lex domicilii, so that it becomes necessary to decide the validity of the parents' marriage first. That is the incidental question of Module 1 in its textbook form.
Pair it with Re Valentine's Settlement, which draws the same line for adoption: recognition of the status by the lex domicilii, rights of succession by the lex successionis, so a foreign adoption may be perfectly good and still give the child no more succession rights than the governing law chooses.
It does not decide anything about the incidents themselves; on this course the lex situs remains master of succession to land.