Text of the provision

Art. 16. Real property as well as personal property is subject to the law of the country where it is situated. However, intestate and testamentary successions, both with respect to the order of succession and to the amount of successional rights and to the intrinsic validity of testamentary provisions, shall be regulated by the national law of the person whose succession is under consideration, whatever may be the nature of the property and regardless of the country wherein said property may be found.

(10a)

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

Article 16 states two of the central conflict-of-laws rules of Philippine private international law. The first paragraph adopts lex rei sitae: property, real or personal, is governed by the law of the country where it is situated. The second paragraph then carves succession out of that rule. When the owner dies, it is the national law of the decedent — not Philippine law, and not the law of the place where the property happens to sit — that regulates the order of succession, the amount of successional rights, and the intrinsic validity of testamentary provisions, whatever the nature of the property and wherever it may be found. For a foreign national who leaves assets in the Philippines, this is the provision that sends the Philippine court to the law of the decedent's own country to decide who inherits and how much: in Bellis v. Bellis the Supreme Court applied Texas law, not the Civil Code's legitime rules, to the Philippine estate of a Texas national. The companion rule on who is capable of inheriting is Article 1039.

Related provisions

Cases interpreting this article

Note. The text of the provision above is reproduced in full from the official enactment (Republic Act No. 386), verified against the LawPhil and ChanRobles renderings. The annotation and commentary around it are the work of Vivas & Nobles Law Office and are general legal information, not legal advice. How a provision applies to a particular situation depends on facts that only a lawyer reviewing your case can assess.