Who Decides Where Your Estate Goes

The hardest question in a cross-border family’s estate is not how much there is — it is who gets to decide where it goes. And the answer flips the moment the family straddles Romania and a common-law country.

Romanian law, like most of the civil-law world, builds in forced heirship: a reserved share of the estate (the rezerva succesorală) is guaranteed by law to close family — children, the surviving spouse, sometimes ascendants — and a will cannot simply cut them out. English law starts from the opposite instinct: testamentary freedom, the idea that you may leave your estate to whomever you choose, subject only to a court’s power to order reasonable provision for certain dependants. Two opposite default answers to the same human question.

Which law even governs your estate?

For a cross-border estate the prior question is which country’s succession law applies at all. Inside the EU, the Succession Regulation (often called Brussels IV, in force since 2015) gives one default answer: the law of the country where the deceased was habitually resident at death governs the whole estate. But it also offers a lever — professio juris: you may choose, in your will, the law of your nationality to govern your succession instead.

The complication for the London–Bucharest family is that the United Kingdom did not opt into the Regulation. So the two systems do not meet on the same map: a Romanian court works within the Regulation, while an English one applies its own rules. A plan that looks settled on one side can be re-opened on the other.

Where it goes wrong

The tempting move — an English national choosing English law to escape the Romanian reserved share — is not the clean escape it looks like. Forced-heirship protections are treated as close to public order in civil-law systems, lifetime gifts that hollow out the reserve can be clawed back and reduced, and assets physically in Romania answer to Romanian procedure whatever the chosen law says. A will that is valid in form can still be partly unwound in substance.

This is also why, as covered in The Trust That Isn’t, succession planning in Romania routes around the trust entirely — through gifts with charges, the split of bare ownership and usufruct, and life insurance — rather than relying on a structure the forum may not recognise.

General comparative information about cross-border succession, not legal advice, and no lawyer–client relationship is created. Forced heirship, the EU Succession Regulation and testamentary-freedom rules carry exceptions and turn on residence, nationality and asset location; any specific estate needs advice on its own facts and current law.