Depecage and Incidental question

An Indian-domiciled man marries a woman in a foreign registry office and later dies. His widow claims a share in his estate. To decide her share the court must first decide whether she is his widow at all, and that depends on whether the foreign marriage was valid. Which law decides that smaller question, the law that governs the estate or the law that would normally govern marriages? That is the incidental question. Its companion, depecage, asks whether one dispute can be cut into slices with different laws for each.

In two minutes

Depecage is the splitting of a legal relationship or dispute so that different issues are governed by different laws; the incidental (preliminary) question is a subsidiary issue that arises inside a main question and could itself be governed by a different law than the main question.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Conflict of Laws on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.