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One of those topics nobody likes talking about - or among those topics - inheritance of Wills, nobody likes thinking of dying; nobody likes thinking of getting divorced, and most assuredly nobody likes going through one. The main topic of this video today is discussion of property distribution or property delineation, splitting property in the event of a divorce. 

Now something that foreign nationals need to be aware of coming into Thailand as a general rule, two things which I have talked about at length but I don't think people really get it. One, foreigners are not allowed to own land in Thailand. There is no structure that gets you around this. It's the law here. Thais don't want foreigners owning their land. That's a fact. So whatever structure somebody "yeses" you to death about when you're talking to them to get you to buy or give them your money, don't listen to it. At the end of the day, foreigners are precluded to own land in Thailand. 

Now what we see a lot of with regard to marital estates here in the office is a lot of foreigners get very upset when they say, 'well I bought the house, I bought the land, I should get credit for this, that and the other thing.' Again, different judges do things differently and they may make decisions to determine division of marital estate in different ways. So I'm not going to sit here and apply any sort of one-size-fits-all analysis, but one thing to be very much aware of when you're dealing with anything pertaining to Thailand, is one, again land ownership is precluded from foreigners, so illegal on its face in the Thai Legal System.

The second one has to do with the notion of equity. As I have discussed in many other videos, Thailand does not have equity in its legal paradigm if you will. Equity comes from the old Church Courts which got folded into basically the Chancery Court over in the British system, which then was exported out to their entire Empire and us colonies, the Americans, where we took it and ran with it. Now we have the American Common Law which is slightly different than the British sort of Westminster Common Law System. But long story short, that equity principle that came from those old Ecclesiastical Courts and then got folded into our legal system in the Common Law, does not exist in any way under the Thai Legal System. This factors in greatly when determining division of marital estates. Precisely how it factors in is going to be driven by the underlying facts in a given case.

For those who are overwhelmed by these issues, it may not be a terrible idea to contact a legal professional, gain some insight and guidance into how best to proceed.