Advantage of legitimacy

Among the more common and persistently nagging issue in the property relations of husband and wife is the ownership of property acquired by a husband while living with a paramour. Who has the better right, the paramour or the legitimate wife? This particular case decided by our Supreme Court may perhaps put to rest this still unsettled question on the matter.

This is the case of John and Nita who had been married for about 19 years and had already three children when John decided to call it quits and just left Nita and the children. John’s decision, as in any other break-up, was due not mainly to purely internal marital differences but more to the influence, wiles and guiles of another woman, Julie. In short, John left the conjugal home and forthwith started to live with Julie with whom he later begot one child named Cecilia.

Three years into his cohabitation with Julie, John purchased a parcel of land on installment basis in a newly opened subdivision in Quezon City. In the deed, he specified his civil status as "married to Julie", his paramour. For ten years, John devotedly paid the installments on the land purchased as he continued to be devoted to his common-law wife, Julie. As a manifestation of his love and devotion to Julie, he even married her while his prior marriage with Nita, was still subsisting. And when finally he completed installment payment, he wrote the seller of the land authorizing said seller to transfer the lot in the name of "his wife Julie" if only to prove to Julie how much he loved her. So the final deed of sale and later the title was issued in the name of "Julie married to John".

John and his paramour continued to cohabit together for almost 21 years, longer than his cohabitation with his legal wife, Nita. This came to an end only when death intervened, when John died. Three years after his death, Julie and her daughter Cecilia, who was already of legal age then, executed a document of extra-judicial partition and sale of the lot in question which was there described as the "conjugal property" of John and Julie wherein the property was transferred in full ownership to Cecilia.

It was only six years later when Nita and her children came to know of the property and what happened to it. So they filed an action for reconveyance of said property claiming they have a better right to it. Can Nita and her children recover the property?

The Supreme Court said yes. Whether the property was acquired when John and the seller signed an agreement for its purchase on installment basis or when the deed of sale was finally executed ten years later after completion of the installment payment, the legal results would be the same. The property remained as belonging to the conjugal partnership of John and his legitimate wife, Nita. Under both the New Civil Code (Art. 160) and the Old Civil Code (Art. 1407, the law in force when the case happened), "all property of the marriage is presumed to belong to the conjugal partnership unless it is proved that it pertains exclusively to the husband and to the wife". This presumption has not been convincingly rebutted.

It cannot be seriously contended that, simply because the property was titled in the name of Julie at John’s request, she should thereby be deemed to be its owner. The property unquestionably was acquired by John. John’s letter to the seller merely authorized the latter to have the title to the property transferred to her name. More importantly, she implicitly recognized John’s ownership when she and her daughter Cecilia executed the deed of extrajudicial partition which exactly conformed to a partition in intestacy of John’s property (Belcodero vs. Court of Appeals, 227 SCRA 303).

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