Halsbury’s Vol 80 para 829 on Personal Property quotes the following in the footnotes as examples for survivorship:
Lady Shore v Billingsly (1687) 1 Vern 482; Morley v Bird (1798) 3 Ves 629; Williams v Hensman (1861) 1 John & H 546; Re Cohen, National Provincial Bank Ltd v Katz [1953] Ch 88 at 95, [1953] 1 All ER 378 at 381–382.
The last one might be slightly easier to find than the earlier examples. I suspect you could also use Halsbury’s and the related passages on land as an authority.
I would tentatively take issue with Paul’s suggestion that a foreign succession law might apply to an English joint bank account as I have always understood that 2 or more joint tenants all have an undivided property interest in the whole. Accordingly, the property (an account in this case) passes legally and beneficially to the survivor(s) under the law of property and does not pass into the estate. As a matter of pure property law, no succession law (English or otherwise) is ever applied.
It is possible that a foreign law of succession may contained forced heirship provisions, and in some circumstances these may require the joint tenant to bring the assets into account when calculating shares of other estate assets or allow family members to bring a claim to claim their compulsory shares, but I don’t believe that the latter would be directly enforceable over joint assets in England. So far as the English Court is concerned, absent a trust, an English joint bank account would pass to the survivor(s).
Andrew Goodman
Osborne Clarke LLP