no extraterritorial effect, on the other hand, when the status of a person is under consideration before the courts of this state in questions of succession, they will apply our own statutes in determining the status of the claimant to the succession; and if the claimant shows that by applying our law he is entitled to take as a legitimate child, it is sufficient, and the fact that by the law of his own country he is not legitimate is immaterial. In the case of Blythe v. Ayres, 96 Cal. 532, 564, [19 L. R. A. 40, 31 Pac. 915], the plaintiff was an illegitimate alien and at all times domiciled beyond the jurisdiction of California, and claimed to succeed to the estate of her intestate father by reason of having become legitimated by acknowledgment on his part in accordance with the provisions of section 230 of the Civil Code. In upholding her claim the court said: "Our statute, conjoined with principles of international law, would have changed her bastardy to legitimacy in the world at large; and regardless of international law, and regardless of all law of foreign countries, our statute law alone would have made her legitimate in the world at large whenever and however that question should present itself in the courts of California." This brings us to the principal contention of the appellants in the case and the one argued at length by them, viz.(that in any event the respondents, being born out of lawful wedlock, are not capable of inheriting any part of their grand- mother's estate, for the reason that to so inherit they must take by right of representation of their father, and that by section 1387 of the Civil Code the right given to illegitimates of succession to the estate of lineal or collateral kindred of their parents is expressly limited to the estates of their brothers and sisters. The question of the rights of succession of a child legitimated by statute to succeed to his grandmother's estate is new in this state, and for that reason is one of more than ordinary interest. Section 1387, referred to above, reads as follows: "Every illegitimate child is an heir of the person who, in writing, signed in the presence of a competent witness, acknowledges himself to be the father of such child; and in all cases is an heir of his mother; and inherits his or her estate, in whole or in part, as the case may be, in the same manner as if he had been born in lawful wedlock; but he does not 32 Cal. App.-19 represent his father or mother by inheriting any part of the estate of his or her kindred, either lineal or collateral, unless, before his death his parents shall have intermarried, and his father, after such marriage, acknowledges him as his child, or adopts him into his family; in which case such child and all the legitimate children are considered brothers and sisters, and on the death of either of them, intestate, and without issue, the others inherit his estate, and are heirs, as hereinbefore provided, in like manner as if all the children had been legitimate; saving to the father and mother, respectively, their rights in the estates of all the children in like manner as if all had been legitimate." In the brief of appellants there is to be found an exhaustive and able analysis, clause by clause of this section, by which it is demonstrated beyond doubt that the part of the section which we have italicized gives only a limited right of succession by representation, to wit, the right to succeed to the estate of deceased brothers and sisters, and does not confer the right to succeed to the estate of a grandmother. And it is the contention of appellants that legitimated children come within the terms of this section of the code, and that their rights of succession are governed by it. We cannot agree with the view that the scope of section 1387 extends to legitimated children. We are of the opinion that this section has nothing to do with the rights of children who, though born out of wedlock, have become legitimated by compliance with section 215 or section 230 of the Civil Code. Those two sections read respectively as follows: "Sec. 215. A child born before wedlock becomes legitimate by the subsequent marriage of its parents." "Sec. 230. The father of an illegitimate child, by publicly acknowledging it as his own, receiving it as such, with the consent of his wife, if he is married, into his family, and otherwise treating it as if it were a legitimate child, thereby adopts it as such; and such child is thereupon deemed for all purposes legitimate from the time of its birth. The foregoing provisions of this chapter do not apply to such an adoption." We think it quite clear that compliance with the terms of either one of these sections makes child born out of lawful wedlock legitimate; that, as stated in section 230, he is legitimate for all purposes, and that, as a legitimate child, his rights of inheritance are governed by section 1386 of the Civil which Code, which confers rights of inheritance upon legitimate children. At common law a child born out of wedlock was said to be filius nullius and to have no heritable blood. These expressions are of course figurative, and meant no more than that certain legal disabilities were attached to his status, one of which was his lack of capacity to inherit from his father or his parents' kindred. There can be no doubt that the legislature could remove those disabilities. The right of inheritance of legitimate and illegitimate children alike is a creature of law, and can be changed by the legislature at any time and to any extent. When the law provides means for making legitimate a child born out of wedlock, it changes the status of that child, and in the absence of special provision to the contrary, he thenceforth comes within the provisions of the laws relating to legitimate children. Thereafter a child so legitimated is included in the designation "child" or "children" when those words refer to a child or children legitimately born; and he is no longer included in the designation "illegitimate child" when that term is used in a statute, unless it is obvious that such words are intended by the legislature to include one who, though now legitimate, was formerly illegitimate. We think these propositions are self-evident. Of what avail is it to have legitimated a child if he still labors under the disabilities of his former condition? If he has not acquired the rights by law given to, and become subject to the duties imposed upon, his new condition, there has been no change at all; for it is obvious that the fact that he was born out of wedlock has not been changed and never can be. If any stigma attaches to that condition it still remains, and all that the law can do-and all it seeks to do is to remove the disabilities attached to the condition. We freely grant tha the legislature can limit the extent to which the disabilities of an illegitimate child are removed; that although it has granted legitimacy in general terms, it can still perpetuate former disabilities or create new ones; so that, in a statute granting rights of succession to the property of intestates, a discrimination may still be made against persons legitimated by statute.) It is the claim of appellants that this is in fact what has been done in section 1387 by that part of the section which we have italicized. A reading of that section without reference to its history lends much color to this contention, but a consideration of that history will make-it apparent that the section deals only with the rights of children born out of wedlock who have never been legitimated. Its provisions first appeared in the law of this state in a statute passed in 1850 (Stats. 1850, p. 219), where, as section 2 thereof, we find it almost word for word. At that time there was no method known to our law of legitimating a child born out of wedlock; and the provisions contained in said section 2 and which are relied upon by appellants as limiting the right of succession of legitimated children-had only as their effect to confer upon illegitimates the limited right of succession there given, and did not purport to change their condition of illegitimacy. They remained illegitimate, and received those limited rights of succession as such. This statute of 1850 remained in force until March 31, 1870, when it was repealed; but upon the adoption of the Civil Code, taking effect on January 1, 1873, we find section 2 of said statute reappearing almost word for word as section 1387 of said. code. Being merely a re-enactment of an old statute it must, upon familiar principles, be given the same meaning and effect as it originally had. Upon its original enactment it merely conferred certain limited rights of inheritance upon illegitimates complying with certain conditions, and did not purport to make them legitimate or to remove their disabilitics in toto. Simultaneously with section 1387 there appeared in the Civil Code, section 230, being itself a re-enactment of section 9 of an act of the legislature approved March 31, 1870. (Stats. 1869-70, p. 530.) Said section 9 had provided for the first time a method for making legitimate by law children born out of wedlock. Section 230 declares that compliance with its provisions makes the child who was theretofore illegitimate legitimate for all purposes. Being legitimate for all purposes it became in the eyes of the law a legitimate child, with all the rights conferred by law upon legitimate children, including that of inheritance under the provisions of section 1386 of that code. The legislation contained in section 9 of the act of March 31, 1870, and re-enacted as section 230 of the Civil Code, was a radical departure from existing law. It may be said to have inaugurated a new era in the rights which society accorded to children born out of wedlock. A note to the section (Civ. Code, Deering, 1915) states that it was based on Field's Draft, New York Civil Code, section 116. (Stats. 1869-70, p. 530, sec. 9.) Speaking of it our code commissioners said: "This provision, like the rest, is new, but is so manifestly just, and the present state of the law is so unmerciful to innocent children, that it is presumed that no objection will be made to the change. At the session of the legislature following the adoption of the codes, section 215 of the Civil Code was enacted. It was but the incorporation into the code of a provision of law which had existed as section 8 of the act approved March 31, 1870, already mentioned. The terms of that section are set forth above; and it will be seen that it provided that the mere marriage of the parents of an illegitimate child legitimated him. It was now no longer necessary, as required by section 230, that the father publicly acknowledge him, receive him into his family, or otherwise treat him as a legitimate child. This is perhaps the most liberal of all enactments removing the disabilities of children born out of wedlock; but under the argument of appellants a child made legitimate by compliance with the requirements of this section has not even the rights of succession that the statute of 1850 (re-enacted as sec. 1387, Civ. Code) conferred upon illegitimates complying with its terms, for the mere marriage of the parents of the illegitimate was not sufficient to confer even those limited rights; there was the further requirement that the father acknowledge the child and adopt him into his family. Nor, under the construction of the statutes concerning legitimacy contended for by appellants, would an illegitimate child legitimated by section 215 of the Civil Code have any right to succeed to the estate even of his father; for under that construction his rights of inheritance being exclusively governed by section 1387, it would be necessary that the father acknowledge in writing his paternity of the child-a condition not required by section 215. Thus we would have a case where a child made legitimate by statute is incapable of inheriting from his own father, much less from his father's kindred, although by the provisions of section 1388 of the Civil Code both the father and the father's kindred are given the right to succeed to his estate. If the construction of the law contended for by appellants were correct, we would have the anomalous condition that sixty or seventy years after the original enactment of section 1387 in 1850, and in spite of the increasingly liberal and humane tendency of legislation |