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# Prepare to Die
- URL: https://renascence-review.ghost.io/prepare-to-die/
- Published: 2026-10-15T10:22:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-09T10:24:27.000Z
- Description: Death and taxes are certain, said Franklin. Which country’s law governs the one, and which country’s collector turns up for the other, is not.
- Author: Casper Anwar
- Tags: Private Wealth

Benjamin Franklin observed that nothing is certain but death and taxes. He did not live to see the modern family, whose members are scattered across continents, nor the modern balance sheet, which is rarely confined to one jurisdiction. For a growing number of people it is no longer clear which legal system will govern their death, or which tax authority will have a claim on what they leave behind.

Consider who now counts as a “cross-border” client. It is anyone with a holiday home in Provence or Tuscany, or stock options in a foreign employer. It is anyone with a child building a career in Singapore or New York, or a spouse, partner or parent born abroad or holding another passport. Not long ago such circumstances belonged to diplomats and merchants. Today they describe the average dentist in Surrey. When the European Commission proposed its reform, it estimated that about 450,000 successions a year in the EU alone had a cross-border element, with assets worth more than €120 billion. That estimate is over a decade old, and the underlying trend towards mobility has scarcely reversed.

### A tale of two traditions

The difficulty is that the world’s legal systems do not agree on what succession is *for*. The common law tradition, heir to centuries of English property law, prizes testamentary freedom: you may, within limits, leave your estate to whomever you please. The civil law tradition reserves a protected share of the estate for the children, and the Nordic countries do much the same. Scotland, characteristically, sits awkwardly between the two, with legal rights for spouses and children that an English lawyer would find exotic.

Nor is Britain a single jurisdiction for these purposes. Scotland, England and Wales, and Northern Ireland have distinct succession laws. The Channel Islands, to the surprise of many bereaved families, are not part of the United Kingdom at all. Even the vocabulary betrays us. “Domicile” means one thing in an English court and something quite different elsewhere.

The conflict-of-laws rules are no more harmonious. Under the common law approach, immovable property is governed by the law of the place where it sits (the *lex situs*), while movable property follows the law of the owner’s domicile. Many continental systems instead apply a single law to the whole estate, traditionally that of the deceased’s nationality, though others have looked to residence or domicile. Where the rules diverge, two countries can each claim, with equal confidence, to be applying the right law to the same house.

### The tax collector

Tax compounds the problem. British inheritance tax long turned on domicile, a notion as slippery as any in English law. Since 6 April 2025 it turns on residence instead. UK-situated assets are generally within the charge whoever owns them. Worldwide assets are within it if the owner is a “long-term UK resident”, meaning resident in the UK for at least ten of the previous twenty tax years. That status does not vanish at the airport. It persists for between three and ten years after departure, depending on how long the person lived there.

The UK’s handful of inheritance and estate tax treaties, around ten in all, continue to operate. Where they once relied on deemed domicile, long-term residence now does the work. Treaty relief is therefore worth checking before assuming that two countries will not both claim their share.

### The Regulation

Europe’s answer to the confusion was Regulation (EU) No 650/2012, known informally as Brussels IV. It was adopted in 2012 and applies to deaths on or after 17 August 2015\. It binds 25 of the 27 member states. Ireland and Denmark stand outside it. The United Kingdom, which had chosen not to opt in while a member, has been a third country since leaving the EU in 2020.

Its central idea is unity. In place of a patchwork, a single law governs the whole estate, movable and immovable alike, wherever the assets lie. By default that is the law of the country where the deceased was **habitually resident** at death. Habitual residence is a question of fact, not a legal construct: the courts ask where the centre of a person’s life actually lay, given the duration and regularity of their presence and their family and social ties. There is an escape clause for those who were manifestly more closely connected with another country, for instance because they had only just left it.

Individuals may also override the default by choosing, in their will, the law of their own nationality. Those with several nationalities may choose any of them. The Regulation applies universally, so a Brit who retires to Spain will find the Spanish courts applying it, whether or not Britain has signed up.

It has limits. It does not govern tax; that remains a matter for each country’s own rules. It leaves some states’ special rules for particular assets, such as farms, intact. It is subject to a public-policy exception. But it governs more than who inherits. It also determines who administers the estate, and whether certain family members hold fixed entitlements.

### Illustrations

**The Scot with a house in France.** Suppose a man lives in Scotland and owns a holiday home in France. A French court applies the Regulation and looks to his habitual residence, which points to Scots law. But Scots law would send French land to French law, and the Regulation permits that “renvoi”. The result is a split: Scots law for most of the estate, French law for the house. If he instead chooses the law of his nationality in his will, which for a Scot points in practice to Scots law, the renvoi is excluded and Scots law should govern everything, including the house in France.

**The Scot in Cyprus.** Take a Scot who moves to Cyprus, becomes habitually resident there, and keeps a house in Scotland. Cyprus applies the Regulation, and so applies Cypriot law to both houses. Scotland applies the *lex situs*, and so applies Scots law to the Scottish one. The same property now has two competing laws and, probably, two sets of lawyers. A choice of Scots law in his will, which Cyprus must respect, brings the two countries into line.

**The lesson.** In both cases a single sentence in a will separates a tidy succession from a protracted legal quarrel.

### What to do

If you have any connection with a country applying the Regulation, review your existing wills. If you own land abroad, it is often worth having a local will to deal with it, drafted to local formalities, since that may ease the transfer. Both wills should make the same choice of law, and they should be drafted together so that neither inadvertently revokes the other.

Above all, make sure that whoever advises you on one part of your affairs can see all of it. A structure designed in London without regard to a house in Tuscany, or one built in Italy that ignores a bank account in Singapore, is a bomb with a long fuse.

Death, as Franklin said, is certain. A bitter, costly dispute among the survivors is not, and only those who prepare can avoid it. The alternative is to leave your heirs a rather expensive education in comparative law.