Jonathan Steinert & Paris Aboro examine the Supreme Court’s approach to the rectification of a will
In the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Marley v Rawlings [2014] UKSC 2, [2014] 1 All ER 807 it was held that, where a husband and wife had mistakenly signed one another’s draft wills, as a result of a clerical error, the court was able to intervene and rectify the wills in order to give effect to the intentions of the testator.
Background
In May 1999, Mr and Mrs Rawlings were visited by their solicitor in order that they could execute the wills he had drafted on their instructions. The wills were short and were drafted in largely identical terms, as “mirror wills”. By their terms, each spouse left his or her entire estate to the other, but, if the other had predeceased, the entire estate was left to the appellant, Mr Marley, to whom the couple were not related but had treated as a son.
By an oversight on the part of the solicitor, each spouse was given the other’s draft will to sign. Both
