Text of the provision
Art. 1039. Capacity to succeed is governed by the law of the nation of the decedent.
(n)
Civil Code of the Philippines, Republic Act No. 386, approved June 18, 1949, effective August 30, 1950. Reproduced in full. The three sources consulted do not read identically here; the text above is the reading carried by two of the three, including the Official Gazette.
What this article means
One sentence long, and decisive in every cross-border estate: capacity to succeed — whether a person is qualified to inherit from the decedent at all — is governed by the law of the nation of the decedent, not by Philippine law. The article completes the rule of Article 16, paragraph 2. Read together, the two provisions refer four questions to the decedent's national law: the order of succession, the amount of successional rights, the intrinsic validity of the provisions of a will, and the capacity to succeed. The Supreme Court has applied the pair in exactly those terms — in Bellis v. Bellis, Cayetano v. Leonidas and Ancheta v. Guersey-Dalaygon the estates of American nationals with Philippine assets were distributed under the law of the decedent's own country, even where that law knows no system of legitimes. So a compulsory heir's standing under Philippine law means nothing, and a disqualification under Philippine law saves no one, if the decedent's national law reads it the other way.
Related provisions
- Article 1038 — Restoring What Was Taken.
- Article 1040 — Five Years to Declare Incapacity.
Cases interpreting this article
- Authorities on this article will be added here as each is verified against primary sources.