57 Kan. 217 | Kan. | 1896
‘ ‘ It is a general principle, that the status, or condition of a person, the relation in which he stands to another person, and by which he is qualified or made capable to take certain rights in that other’s property, is fixed by the law of the domicil; and that this status and capacity are to be recognized and upheld in every other state, so far as they are not inconsistent with its own laws and policy. Subject to this limitation, upon the death of any man, the status of those who claim succession or inheritance in his estate is to be ascertained by the law under which that status was acquired; his personal property is indeed to be distributed according to the law of his domicil at the time of his death, and his real estate descends according to the law of the place in which it is situated; but, in either case, it is according to those provisions -of that law which regulate. the succession or the in.heritance of persons having such a status.”
“ Under the Roman law, the person adopted entered into the family, and came under the power of the person adopting him. And the effect was such, that the person adopted stood not only himself in relation of child to him- adopting, but his children became the grandchildren of such person.”
In Power &c. v. Hafley &c., 85 Ky. 671, the Court of Appeals of Kentucky held that where an adopted child, made capable by a special act of taking and holding by descent the estate of the person adopting him, dies before such person, leaving children, those children inherit the estate of the person who adopted their deceased parent, as if they were his grandchildren, the jus representations attaching as fully to the adopted child as to the child by blood. In the construction of a statute founded upon a principle of the Roman Law, we are authorized to appeal to that law as an aid in the interpretation of the statute ; and we think it plain, from the language of our statutes construed in the light of the adjudged cases and the principles of the Civil Law, that the widower and the child of Alice Ann inherited through her an interest in the estate of Adam Huffman.
The Court below correctly applied the law to theuncontroverted facts in the case, and the judgment-must be affirmed.