Cross-Border Succession Disputes: Challenges of Conflict of Laws in Personal Status Matters

Abstract

Cross-border succession conflicts are among the most difficult subfields of the private international law where nationality, domicile, and religion tend to overlap, creating competing legal claims to the same estate. These issues have been compounded by the globalization of family relationships, the rise in migration and transnational ownership of property and reveal the inefficiency of the current conflict-of-laws models in addressing the question of personal status. In this paper, the legal aspects of cross-border succession are analyzed with a further emphasis on defining the jurisdictional competency, law applicable, and recognition and application of foreign succession judgment. It is also a discussion of the conflict between secular and religious legal systems, especially in Muslim dominated jurisdiction such as in Pakistan where the personal status rules are usually based on religious law, thus creating some possible mean clash with foreign civil law systems. By providing a comparative study of the European Union rules, the English common law, and the Pakistani legal practices, the research paper reveals the discrepancies and suggests the ways of aligning the principle of the conflict-of-laws to provide fairness and predictability in a transnational inheritance dispute.