Page 353 - WhyAsInY

Do a JoB—Harvey tHe litiGator
will that Mr. Kern, an attorney, had executed in the office of his law firm in New York. The new will left everything to Mrs. Kern. Surprise, sur- prise, the will bearing the earlier date had left two-thirds of Mr. Kern’s rather substantial estate to a trust for the benefit of charities in which he had historically taken a keen interest, and only one-third, effectively the statutory minimum, to his young bride, in whom his interest was more recent.
We represented the charities. Thus, we had before us a potential will contest in which there was likely a forgery—and possibly even a murder. Pretty exciting stuff for a young lawyer! And on what talent of mine will we rely to save the day? Research, of course! And what’s the key issue? Domicile! Domicile?
Yes, domicile. It turns out that if Mr. Kern was a domiciliary of Connecticut when he died, then the three-page document would not be admitted to probate, because Connecticut law would govern and the later will lacked the number of witnesses that Connecticut required. If he died a New York domiciliary, however, then New York law would govern and the three-pager would be recognized as Kern’s valid last will, unless it was shown to have been a forgery, not a simple task. Domi- cile, in a world where people have multiple residences, is a very fact-based concept from which the courts purport to decide which of a person’s homes is the one that he or she acquired with the “intention to remain.” Thus, I had to read scads of cases to be in a position to figure out whether a court would find that Kern was domiciled in New York or in Connecticut. This time, however, I had to write a memorandum upon which our strategy would presumably be based, and that memorandum would go to someone who had cut his teeth writing memos and opin- ions for Benjamin Cardozo. This made me more nervous than hearing about recourse balloon mortgages from the reputedly toughest attorney in the firm.
Anyway, to reduce somewhat the agony of reading about the boring things that first-year associates do, I cut it mercifully short by saying that I spent days and days to come to the conclusion that, contrary to what the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review would have con-
• 335 •