Incidental questions in private international law with respect to the problems and elements discussed below.
In the Roman conflict of laws, an incidental question is a legal issue that arises in connection with the major cause of action in a lawsuit.
For example, the court may classify the cause as "succession", but it notes that the plaintiff brings the claim for relief as the deceased's widow.
The marriage was in England and, as both the lex loci celebrationis and the lex situs, English law declares it valid even though it is void ab initio under California law because it is considered bigamous (see nullity): a divorce decree granted by the American courts was recognised as valid in England, but not in California.
The outcome suggests that the same law will be applied to both the main and the incidental questions on the understanding that the forum court is probably making a policy decision on which outcome is the more desirable – in both cases, the courts seem to have been interested in upholding the validity of the second marriage reflecting a rebuttable presumption in both jurisdictions to recognise marriages valid under their lex loci celebrationis in default of any strong policy reason to the contrary.