Two Wills in Two Countries: Which One Controls?

What Situs Means and Why It Decides Which Law Applies

Lawyers call it situs, and the plain-English version is that every asset has a location in law, not only on a map. Land is the easy case, because it cannot be moved, so the country it lies in decides how it passes when the owner dies. Accounts, shares and personal belongings each have their own rules for where the law considers them to be, and those rules do not always match your address.

Out of that one idea comes the whole subject. Your Florida house answers to Florida law whatever your will says and wherever you signed it. An apartment abroad answers to that country, and many countries reserve a fixed share of an estate for children or a spouse no matter what your document says. Some will not accept a foreign document to transfer local land at all, and some do not recognise trusts. So a second will is usually a sensible structure rather than a mistake, because a local will moves local property faster than a foreign one ever will. The danger is not that two wills exist. It is that they were drafted by people who never learned about each other, and that one of them carries a sentence which quietly cancels the other.

The Revocation Trap in One Line of Boilerplate

Florida law draws a hard line between two ways a later will can cancel an earlier one, and almost everything on this page hangs on which side of that line your documents fall.

By a subsequent inconsistent will or codicil, even though the subsequent inconsistent will or codicil does not expressly revoke all previous wills or codicils, but the revocation extends only so far as the inconsistency.

Section 732.505(1), Florida Statutes (2025).

Read in a cross-border light that is genuinely reassuring. A later will made abroad, disposing of foreign property, saying nothing whatever about your Florida house, does not by its own force revoke the Florida gift. The two documents cover different ground, and Florida lets both stand except where they collide.

Now the other side of the line.

By a subsequent will, codicil, or other writing executed with the same formalities required for the execution of wills declaring the revocation.

Section 732.505(2), Florida Statutes (2025).

That is the trap, and it is a stationery problem more than a legal one. Practically every will template in the world opens by declaring that the signer revokes all former wills. The clause exists to stop an old domestic will resurfacing, it is typed before anyone asks whether the client owns anything overseas, and it says exactly what it says. A later will carrying it is no longer a document about foreign property. It speaks to every will the person ever made.

Florida has said for the better part of a century that revoking a will takes both an act and a matching intention.

In order to revoke a valid will there must be a joint operation of act and intention to revoke; and the intention must not be conditional.

Stewart v. Johnson, 142 Fla. 425, 194 So. 869 (1940).

Intention is where a family will fight, because nobody signing a routine will abroad means to disinherit anyone at home. The trouble is that a clean revocation clause is powerful evidence of intention by itself, and arguing that someone meant less than what they signed is uphill work in any court.

One honest gap belongs here rather than buried at the bottom. Florida requires a revoking instrument to be executed with the same formalities as a will, and it has a separate rule about when a will signed abroad by a nonresident counts as validly executed here. Whether the second rule supplies the formalities the first one demands is the central legal question of this whole subject, and we located no Florida decision answering it. That is exactly why the fix belongs in the drafting, where it costs nothing.

What Florida Does When the Later Will Is Attacked

Suppose the later will is challenged and it falls. Does the earlier will come back, or does the estate pass as though there had never been a will at all? Florida answers with a doctrine it has had since 1940, dependent relative revocation, and the idea behind the long name is simple. If someone revoked an old will only because they believed a new one was taking its place, and the new one turns out to be no good, a court may treat the revocation as having depended on that belief and put the old will back.

It is a presumption and not a guarantee, and Florida has proved that twice. The Florida Supreme Court refused it in a 1956 case where applying it would have meant looking outside a properly probated will for the signer’s intent. A district court refused it again in 1984, where a drafting lawyer had left the residuary clause out of a valid new will, and the leftover estate passed by intestacy instead of being repaired from the older document. Courts protect what people actually signed, even when the result is plainly not what anyone wanted.

And here the law is genuinely unsettled, which is the honest headline of this page. In 2016 the Second District Court of Appeal decided a six-will estate in which a lawyer and an accountant’s associate had unduly influenced the last will to make themselves beneficiaries. The probate court struck the tainted gifts but kept the revocation clause alive, so the bulk of the estate was heading to unknown intestate heirs. The Second District reversed and revived the earlier will. Then it did what courts do only when they think a question needs settling above them.

We certify conflict with Wehrheim v. Golden Pond Assisted Living Facility, 905 So. 2d 1002, 1008 (Fla. 5th DCA 2005), as discussed in section III(A)(2) of our opinion.

Rocke v. American Research Bureau, 184 So. 3d 1221 (Fla. 2d DCA 2016), on rehearing. Later Florida courts cite the case as In re Estate of Murphy.

The conflict is narrower than it looks, and the narrowness matters. The two districts agree on most of the doctrine. They part company on one evidentiary question, whether a probate court may look at evidence from outside the wills themselves when deciding whether the doctrine applies in an undue influence case.

But we must part company with the Fifth District insofar as Wehrheim would preclude a probate court from considering extrinsic evidence when deciding the doctrine's applicability in claims involving undue influence.

Rocke v. American Research Bureau, 184 So. 3d 1221 (Fla. 2d DCA 2016).

What the older Fifth District decision holds is the part most readers get backwards. It does not say a revocation clause automatically dies with the will that carried it. It says the opposite, that the clause may survive a will otherwise void for undue influence, and it makes survival a question of fact.

Whether the alleged undue influence, if proven, is pervasive enough to permeate the entire will, including the revocation clause, and whether the decedent intended the revocation clause to be independent of, and unconditional on, the validity of the other provisions of the 2002 will are factual issues that must be determined by the trier of fact.

Wehrheim v. Golden Pond Assisted Living Facility, 905 So. 2d 1002 (Fla. 5th DCA 2005).

The same court drew one bright line, borrowed from an earlier decision of its own. Undue influence can be aimed at particular provisions while leaving the decision to make a new will intact. A signer who lacked capacity could not have formed an intention to revoke anything.

We can envision a circumstance where undue influence may not prevent the operation of an express revocation clause since it is possible that the undue influence may be limited to particular aspects of a new will, not the decision to make a new will. Incapacity is another matter.

First Union National Bank of Florida, N.A. v. Estate of Mizell, 807 So. 2d 78, 80 (Fla. 5th DCA 2001), quoted and adopted in Wehrheim.

So was the conflict ever resolved? We looked on August 19, 2026, in the Florida appellate courts’ own docket system and elsewhere, running control searches alongside so we could tell a real zero from a broken query. The method is set out in the sources below. We found no petition invoking the Supreme Court’s discretionary conflict jurisdiction, and no disposition of one. So far as our review on that date could determine, the conflict certified in 2016 has never been resolved. We are not saying review was sought and refused, because we found no order refusing it either. We found no proceeding at all.

There is a second finding, and it may be the strangest thing on this page. Florida has a sentence of enacted law that answers the question directly, and no court appears ever to have used it.

If the revocation of a will, or any part thereof, is procured by fraud, duress, mistake, or undue influence, such revocation is void.

Section 732.5165, Florida Statutes (2025), third sentence, added in 2011.

Our own review on August 19, 2026 searched the statutory phrase and the section number across Florida state and federal courts, in every precedential-status category rather than the default one, and read every Florida decision that came back. Not one applies, construes, or even quotes that third sentence. Every one uses the first or second sentence and stops. One appellate decision from 2015 sets the statute out in a block quotation and ends it with an ellipsis exactly where the third sentence begins.

A will is void if the execution is procured by fraud, duress, mistake, or undue influence. Any part of the will is void if so procured, but the remainder of the will not so procured shall be valid if it is not invalid for other reasons. . . .

Fiel v. Hoffman, 169 So. 3d 1274 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015), quoting section 732.5165. The ellipsis is the court’s.

We publish that as our own review on a stated date and nothing more. A search can miss documents, and a court could apply the rule while citing something else, so this is not a certainty and we make no prediction about how a court would read the sentence. What it does mean is real enough. A family arguing about a revocation clause in Florida today is arguing inside an unresolved district split, next to a sentence of law that has sat untested for fifteen years.

How a Foreign Will Gets Into a Florida Probate

Validity and machinery are two different problems, and families usually meet the second only after solving the first. Florida starts generously.

Any will, other than a holographic or nuncupative will, executed by a nonresident of Florida, either before or after this law takes effect, is valid as a will in this state if valid under the laws of the state or country where the will was executed.

Section 732.502(2), Florida Statutes (2025).

Three limits sit on the face of that sentence. It runs to a nonresident. It is about how the will was signed, not what it means or what it revokes. And it throws out two whole categories however valid they are at home, namely the handwritten unwitnessed will and the will spoken aloud rather than written. That exclusion kills more foreign wills in Florida than anything else, and our page on handwritten wills in Florida covers it.

Then the machinery. In much of the civil-law world the original will never leaves the notary’s office, because the notary is required to keep it, so there is no original to carry to a Florida courthouse. Florida solves that squarely, accepting an authenticated copy, authenticated either by an American consular officer or under the Hague Convention of 1961, which is the apostille your foreign lawyer will know by name. Two further routes cover a Florida resident’s will probated abroad by mistake, and a nonresident’s foreign will admitted to record here to pass Florida real property once the timing conditions are met. Our guide to ancillary probate covers the second Florida case a foreign family usually faces.

What Florida does not have is the thing people ask for by name. An international convention creates a standard form of will meant to travel across borders, and a minority of American states have adopted it. We searched the complete published 2025 text of Florida’s probate chapters and the word international does not appear in them, against a control search returning 241 hits for the word will in the wills chapter alone, so the search was live. That was four chapters rather than the whole statutes, and we did not check whether a bill ever failed. The lesson holds anyway. Do not ask a Florida lawyer for an international will. Ask which of Florida’s actual routes fits the document you have.

One more thing, before anyone assumes a Florida judge cannot cope with foreign law. Florida courts do this. In a 2017 inheritance dispute the Second District had to decide whether a couple had ever been married under Israeli law, and it worked from the testimony of two Israeli family lawyers.

Ordinarily, a lower court's application of a foreign jurisdiction's law is subject to de novo review on appeal

Cohen v. Shushan, 212 So. 3d 1113 (Fla. 2d DCA 2017).

Foreign law in a Florida probate is proved by testimony and then applied. That works. It is also slow, costly and contestable, which is a strong argument for settling the question in the documents while everyone is alive.

What Other Countries Have Done With the Same Problem

None of what follows is Florida law and none of it binds a Florida court. These are published decisions in other families’ litigation, in other legal systems, and they earn their place for one reason. They show how thin the margin is when a court has to decide what a revocation clause was meant to reach.

England, and the answer changed twice. A man with an English estate and an Indian estate signed an Indian will in 2016 declaring it his last and final will and cancelling the previous documents. His English will of 2007 was what stood to be lost. In 2021 the High Court held the clause revoked the earlier wills entirely, so the English estate passed as on an intestacy. In 2022 a different High Court judge reversed that, reading the clause as limited to Indian wills because the will was Indian in every visible respect. In 2023 the Court of Appeal reversed again and restored the first decision.

That does not mean that he positively intended to die intestate, but it does mean the force of the presumption against intestacy is quite a weak one in the circumstances. I do not think it is enough to overcome the natural meaning of the general revocation clause.

Nugee LJ, Sangha v. Sangha [2023] EWCA Civ 660 (Court of Appeal of England and Wales).

Three judgments, three courts, and the middle one went the other way. We did not check whether permission to appeal further was sought or refused, so we do not call it the last word. What a Florida reader should carry away is smaller and harder. The presumption that people do not mean to die without a will is real, and it lost to the plain words of a revocation clause.

Queensland, and the popular version of this story is backwards. A man held a Thai will and a UK will, each written for the assets in its own country, then signed an Australian will in 2019 whose opening clause read as follows.

I hereby revoke all former wills and testamentary dispositions previously made by me and declare this to be my last will and testament.

Clause 1 of the Australian will, as set out in Re Perry [2021] QSC 97 (Supreme Court of Queensland).

Note which document did the damage. It was the later one and it was the domestic one, and the wills it wiped out were the earlier foreign ones. Almost every retelling of this case has that the wrong way round. The judge described the consequence plainly.

The unintended effect of the Australian will is that it would revoke the UK and Thai wills ... More concerningly, it would deprive the deceased’s handicapped brother of his use for life of the Perry family’s UK home, and also deprive him of the intended financial support during his life provided for by the UK will.

Henry J, Re Perry [2021] QSC 97, at paragraph 7.

And the cause was mundane enough to happen to anyone.

His lawyer did not correct that erroneous impression because she was unaware of those overseas wills and assets.

Henry J, Re Perry [2021] QSC 97, at paragraph 11.

Queensland could repair that after the man died, because it gives its court a statutory power to rectify a will so that it carries out what the signer actually meant. The court used it to add eleven words to the revocation clause, saving both foreign wills, and the words were “except for my wills of 13 September 2018 and 21 September 2018”. Read that as a drafting instruction rather than a remedy. Florida law gives courts reformation powers over trusts and we did not find a matching general power over wills, and we have not run a targeted search to prove that absence, so we treat it as a warning rather than a rule. Either way, the sentence a Queensland judge had to insert after a death is one a Florida drafter can type for free before one.

One caution about the material circulating on this subject. It attracts bad citations. Preparing this page we checked every authority against the court’s own published text, and several citations that circulate freely online turned out to point at real judgments on completely unrelated subjects, while one frequently repeated Canadian decision on this exact question does not exist at all. A citation that resolves to a live case is not a verified citation. If somebody hands you a case name for this problem, read the case.

The Drafting Fix, and Where It Is Weakest

Two clauses do almost all of the work, and they are not equally strong.

The scope restriction says the will deals only with assets in one country. It is worth having, and on its own it is the weaker of the two. The English case above is the proof. That Indian will was made in India, by Indian lawyers, about Indian assets, and a High Court judge built a whole presumption on those facts. The Court of Appeal rejected the presumption and reversed him. Context did not save the earlier will. What did work, in an older English decision the Court of Appeal accepted as good and which we know only from its account, was a scope sentence written into the will’s own words, sitting beside the revocation clause so the two had to be read together. So write the limit into the document rather than trusting a court to infer it.

The express carve-out names the other will by its date and its country and says in terms that this will does not revoke it. That is the stronger instrument and the one to lead with, because it is literally the language a Queensland judge had to insert by court order after a death. It also answers the point the English judge made against the man who lost, that had he wanted to limit the clause he could readily have said so and did not. On the Florida side we can say how the statute reads and how other courts have treated equivalent wording. We cannot say a Florida court has enforced such a carve-out, because we found no Florida decision that has considered one.

Three practical points matter at least as much as the wording.

• Identify the other will by date and country, not by description. The English fight came down to which earlier words the word “such” pointed back to. Precision about the referent is the entire argument.
• Mirror the carve-out in every will, and revisit all of them whenever any one changes. This is the part people miss. A perfect carve-out in your Florida will is worthless the moment you sign a new will abroad with fresh boilerplate in it. The recurring danger is not the will you already have. It is the next will, in any country, including this one.
• Tell each lawyer that the other document exists. The Australian disaster happened because the drafting lawyer did not know about two foreign wills. That is an intake failure, not a drafting failure, and it is the single most preventable link in the chain.

A fourth point cuts both ways and almost nobody raises it. Because Florida refuses a handwritten unwitnessed will however valid it is where it was made, a foreign will of that kind can be fully effective abroad and completely ineffective here. It may revoke nothing in Florida while disposing of everything overseas. Someone who believes their handwritten will abroad replaced their old Florida will can be wrong in both directions at once, and only reading both documents against both systems will show it. If the change you want is small, a Florida codicil done properly is often the cleaner tool, and our Florida wills guide covers the signing formalities that make any of it hold.

How We Work With Local Counsel Abroad

We build the United States and Florida side of the plan, and we do not opine on the law of a country we are not admitted in. Nobody should. What we do instead is run the coordination, which is the part that usually goes missing, and it is mostly bookkeeping.

We inventory every instrument you have signed, in every country, with its date. We inventory every asset alongside where it sits in law, because that decides which system governs it. We draft the Florida documents with the carve-out written in and the scope stated on the face of the will. Then we send your lawyer in the other country a plain statement of what the Florida will does and what it deliberately leaves alone, and we ask for the same back about theirs. The whole set lives in one file, and it gets looked at again whenever any single document in it changes.

Most of this runs remotely, by video and email, which suits families spread across time zones. If your situation also involves foreign tax or reporting, the wider picture lives on our international and cross-border hub, and non-citizen couples should start with estate planning for non-US citizens. If the two wills are already being fought over rather than planned, our probate litigation page covers that side.

Frequently Asked Questions

Common Situations

The London flat and the Naples condo. A dual national keeps a Florida will from 2015 covering a Naples condo, then buys a flat in London and signs an English will in 2023 with the standard opening clause revoking all former wills. Nobody involved on either side is told about the other document. Read literally, the newer will speaks to the Florida condo too, and the Florida gift the family has assumed for a decade is exposed to argument. The fix took one added sentence in each will naming the other by date and country, and it cost less than a single hour of the fight it prevented.

The handwritten will from home. An adult child arrives with a page in a parent’s handwriting, signed and dated abroad, leaving everything to her. The document is unquestionably good where it was written. In Florida it is not a will at all, because Florida refuses a handwritten unwitnessed will whatever the other country allows. The parent’s older Florida will is the one that governs the Florida house, which nobody expected, and the family spends the first meeting learning that the two documents were never in competition.

The estate with a revocation clause and a challenge. A personal representative finds a last will signed months before death that revokes everything before it, and two siblings say the person who arranged it had taken over their mother’s affairs. If that will falls, whether the earlier one revives is a real question rather than a formality, the answer may turn on evidence from outside the documents, and which appellate district the case sits in can change what a judge is allowed to look at. That is a case to assess early, before positions harden and before the estate spends money on the wrong theory.

Sources of Law

• Florida Probate Code, ch. 732 (2025 Florida Statutes, retrieved from the Legislature’s own site 2026-08-19): §732.502(2) (a will other than a holographic or nuncupative will, executed by a nonresident, is valid here if valid where executed), §732.505(1) (a later inconsistent will revokes only so far as the inconsistency) and (2) (express revocation by a later instrument executed with will formalities), §732.506 (revocation by act, with intent an express element), §732.5165 (fraud, duress, mistake and undue influence; the third sentence voiding a procured revocation was added by s. 6, ch. 2011-183).
• Getting a foreign will before a Florida court, ch. 733 and ch. 734 (2025 Florida Statutes, retrieved 2026-08-19): §733.205 (probate of a notarial will from an authenticated copy, authenticated by an American consular officer or under the Hague Convention of 1961), §733.206 (a resident’s will probated abroad through inadvertence, error or omission), §734.104 (an authenticated copy of a nonresident’s will devising Florida real property may be admitted to record after 2 years from death or after the domiciliary personal representative’s discharge, where there has been no Florida administration and the will was executed as required by chapter 732). Our ancillary probate page carries the fuller §734.104 treatment and is consistent with this one.
• Dependent relative revocation and the void-revocation rule: Stewart v. Johnson, 142 Fla. 425, 194 So. 869 (1940) (adopting the doctrine; the quoted sentence on act and intention). In re Estate of Pratt, 88 So. 2d 499 (Fla. 1956) (refusing the doctrine on its facts; quoting the predecessor void-revocation statute, whose vices included "menace," a word the current section does not carry). In re Estate of Barker, 448 So. 2d 28 (Fla. 1st DCA 1984) (residue passed by intestacy after a draftsman’s omission; the doctrine refused because proving the mistake needed extrinsic evidence). (retrieved 2026-08-19)
• The certified conflict: Rocke v. American Research Bureau, 184 So. 3d 1221 (Fla. 2d DCA 2016), No. 2D14-4107, issued on rehearing and cited by later Florida courts as In re Estate of Murphy. Reading note. An earlier opinion of November 6, 2015 was withdrawn and replaced by the January 20, 2016 opinion, which added the certification; the withdrawn opinion carries no reporter citation and is not the law. Conflicting decision, Wehrheim v. Golden Pond Assisted Living Facility, 905 So. 2d 1002 (Fla. 5th DCA 2005). The capacity passage is First Union National Bank of Florida, N.A. v. Estate of Mizell, 807 So. 2d 78, 80 (Fla. 5th DCA 2001), quoted and adopted in Wehrheim. (retrieved 2026-08-19)
• Our review of the conflict, stated as our own review on a stated date. On 2026-08-19 we queried the Florida appellate courts’ own docket system for any case naming Second District appeal 2D14-4107 as its originating case, and for any case carrying the party name, with control queries that returned Supreme Court cases originating from neighbouring 2D14 appeal numbers so a zero could be told from a broken query. We also searched a national case database, across every precedential-status category, for the conflicting decision’s name in Supreme Court of Florida opinions. No petition invoking the discretionary conflict jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of Florida, and no disposition of one, was located. We do not say review was denied; we found no Supreme Court proceeding at all. One limit we record openly. That docket system’s coverage of the Second District for 2014 is incomplete, so the finding rests on the Supreme Court side of the system, where the controls show coverage is present.
• Our review of §732.5165’s third sentence, stated as our own review on a stated date. On 2026-08-19 we searched the exact statutory phrase nationwide with no court filter, and the section number across Florida state and federal courts for documents filed on or after June 2011, in all seven precedential-status categories rather than the default, between control queries that returned their expected hits at the start and the end of the run. Every Florida decision returned was read. We located no Florida decision applying, construing, or even quoting the third sentence. Fiel v. Hoffman, 169 So. 3d 1274 (Fla. 4th DCA 2015) block quotes the section and elides that sentence with an ellipsis. Two known limits apply. A section-number search can miss documents containing the number, and a court could apply the rule while citing a different section; the cross-section searches that would close that gap were not run.
• Foreign law in a Florida probate: Cohen v. Shushan, 212 So. 3d 1113 (Fla. 2d DCA 2017), No. 2D15-4629 (an inheritance dispute decided on expert testimony about Israeli marital law; the quoted sentence is from the majority). (retrieved 2026-08-19)
• Florida has not enacted a uniform international wills act, stated as our own review. On 2026-08-19 we downloaded the complete published 2025 text of Florida Probate Code chapters 731, 732, 733 and 734 from the Legislature’s own site and searched them mechanically. The word “international” returned zero hits in all four chapters, against a control of 241 hits for “will” in chapter 732 alone. Limits. This was a four-chapter search and not a search of the whole Florida Statutes, no legislative-history search was run for a bill that may have failed, and a full-text search endpoint we tried returned an empty page for the control terms as well, so nothing was inferred from it.
• England and Wales, persuasive only and not Florida law: Sangha v. Sangha [2021] EWHC 1599 (Ch) (Deputy Master Bowles, revocation clause given its literal effect, English estate intestate), [2022] EWHC 2157 (Ch) (Simon Gleeson DHCJ, reversed, clause read as limited to Indian wills), [2023] EWCA Civ 660 (Nugee LJ, with Carr and Arnold LJJ, reversed again and the first decision restored). The 2022 and 2023 judgments come from The National Archives Find Case Law, the official publisher; the 2021 judgment was read from an Internet Archive capture and is not quoted here. Reading note. We did not check whether permission to appeal to the United Kingdom Supreme Court was sought or refused, so this page does not describe the 2023 decision as final. Re Wayland [1951] 1 All ER 1041 is described only as the Court of Appeal describes it in Sangha, and we have not retrieved it. (retrieved 2026-08-19)
• Queensland, persuasive only and not Florida law: Re Perry [2021] QSC 97 (Henry J, Supreme Court of Queensland at Cairns, 26 March 2021), read from the Supreme Court Library Queensland judgment archive; rectification under the Succession Act 1981 (Qld), s 33, read from the Office of the Queensland Parliamentary Counsel. Reading note. The ellipsis in the paragraph 7 quotation removes a short dashed parenthetical and changes no meaning. (retrieved 2026-08-19)
• Disclosures required by our own research rules. Every decision discussed here is a published opinion in another party’s litigation, not a matter handled by this firm, and none of them predicts anything about your case. Foreign decisions are stated as foreign law, and we do not opine on the law of any country in which we are not admitted. Florida law on the survival of a revocation clause is contested and is presented as contested. No commercial citator pass has been run on these authorities, so the absence of a negative-treatment note here means the checks described above were run on the stated date, not that a case has been certified as current.

Updated on August 19, 2026. Reviewed by Kevin D. Klagge, Esq., Fla. Bar No. 99502. Attorney Kevin Klagge represents families, businesses, and international clients in estate and tax planning, business structuring, and international law, with a focus on Florida legal tools. He litigates estate and business issues in court. General information about Florida and United States law, not legal advice, and no attorney-client relationship is created. Foreign law is described as foreign law and is a matter for counsel admitted there. Outcomes depend on the specific facts; past results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Do not send confidential information until we have agreed to represent you.