Essential Validity
Even though a will may be formally valid, it may not be essentially valid as above, the succession to movables will be governed by the deceased's personal law, and if there is a limitation on testamentary capacity, the terms of a will breaching that law will be invalid even if validly executed.
Similarly, a will validly executed in one state cannot override mandatory provisions in the lex situs. The doctrine of evasion applies because otherwise a husband who wishes to evade laws imposing community property can defeat the claims of a wife by the simple expedient of executing a formally valid will in a state that does not have such law.
Read more about this topic: Conflict Of Succession Laws
Famous quotes containing the words essential and/or validity:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“There are ... two minimum conditions necessary and sufficient for the existence of a legal system. On the one hand those rules of behavior which are valid according to the system’s ultimate criteria of validity must be generally obeyed, and on the other hand, its rules of recognition specifying the criteria of legal validity and its rules of change and adjudication must be effectively accepted as common public standards of official behavior by its officials.”
—H.L.A. (Herbert Lionel Adolphus)