Chapter 1 - § 1.11 • OTHER DECISIONS ON JURISDICTION OVER PERSONAL PROPERTY

• Jurisdiction: Colorado

§ 1.11 • OTHER DECISIONS ON JURISDICTION OVER PERSONAL PROPERTY

There have been two rules used with differing results to determine which of two states has jurisdiction over personal property: lex situs and mobilia sequuntur personam. The Supreme Court of the United States has weighed the respective strengths of the rules in the following language:

No general principles of the law are better settled, or more fundamental, than that the legislative power of every State extends to all property within its borders, and that only so far as the comity of that State allows can such property be affected by the law of any other State. The old rule, expressed in the maxim mobilia sequuntur personam, by which personal property was regarded as subject to the law of the owner's domicile, grew up in the Middle Ages, when movable property consisted chiefly of gold and jewels, which could be easily carried by the owner from place to place, or secreted in spots known only to himself. In modern times, since the great increase in the amount and variety of personal property, not immediately connected with the person of the owner, that rule has yielded more and more to the lex situs, or the law of the place where the property is kept and used.⁶⁹

There are cases in which original probate has taken place in a state other than the domicile.⁷⁰ Iowa brought an original proceeding in the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to enjoin a Minnesota probate court from undertaking original probate administration on the estate of an Iowa domiciliary who had sent nearly his entire personal estate to Minnesota for custody in order to defeat certain Iowa tax laws. The court said: "Regardless of the domicil[e] of the decedent, these notes and bonds were subject to probate proceedings in that State [Minnesota]."⁷¹

The case law is evolving on the question of whether a cause of action is a sufficient asset to support local jurisdiction. In Wheat v. Fidelity & Casualty Co.,⁷² it was held that the claim of a deceased nonresident public liability policyholder against the insurance company would not support a probate proceeding in Colorado, on the theory that the situs of the claim was at the decedent's domicile.⁷³ Later cases have, however, upheld jurisdiction where the asset was a potential right of indemnity under an automobile liability policy issued by a company licensed to do business in Colorado where a non-resident decedent was killed in an accident in Colorado.⁷⁴

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Notes:

^[69] Pullman's Palace...