Birth, Marriage and Death at Sea in South African Law

Birth marks the beginning of a natural person’s legal personality; should the person marry personal and proprietary consequences follow; death terminates a person’s legal personality. In South African law the place where a person is born does not affect his or her private-law status. Indeed, the person’s domicile is used as the connecting factor to identify the legal system (lex domicilii) ‘which determines whether and to what extent that person has legal capacity: capacity to act and capacity to litigate’. However, the place where a person is born may affect his or her public-law status because it is one of the factors taken into account for the purpose of granting South African citizenship to an individual. By contrast, the place where a marriage is celebrated does matter for private-law purposes because the lex celebrationis is the legal system used in South Africa to test the validity of a marriage. However, the legal relevance of the place where a marriage is celebrated is limited for public-law purposes by the fact that no person can ‘acquire or lose South African citizenship by reason merely of a marriage contracted by him or her’. As in the case of marriage, the place where a death occurs matters for private-law purposes to the extent that that fact may have an impact on the formal validity of a will