ABSTRACT
The last will and testament is the oldest legal instrument still in routine use, and a substantial body of legal scholarship has documented its growing inadequacy for contemporary patterns of life, wealth, and mortality. Three intersecting failures recur in this literature. First, will doctrine assesses authenticity only after the testator’s death, which displaces the most critical evidence (capacity, intent, voluntariness) to the moment when it can no longer be created. Second, the will is fixed to a single jurisdiction in a world of multi-jurisdictional lives, multi-jurisdictional property, and multi-jurisdictional families. Third, the instrument was designed for assets bounded by recordable title and traceable institutional custody; it has no native concept for cryptographic assets, whose ownership is not recordable in the doctrinal sense and whose recovery depends on information that may exist only inside the testator’s memory.
This paper proposes that the appropriate response to these documented failures is not further incremental statutory reform of the will but the recognition of a legally recognized succession infrastructure that sits behind existing wills, trusts, beneficiary designations, and digital-asset custody mechanisms, and produces the document or proof each receiving institution requires. It calls this infrastructure the Inheritance Protocol: a living, verified succession record that proves who the person is, records capacity at each major update, maps the person’s assets, identifies intended recipients, and generates court-ready or institution-ready outputs after death. Such outputs may include a probate-ready will, a capacity-attestation packet, an executor asset inventory, a beneficiary identity certificate, a crypto key-release instruction, or a jurisdiction-specific inheritance declaration. The paper develops the architecture of such a protocol in four layers (identity and capacity attestation; intent and beneficiaries; asset graph; versioning, trigger, and custody), develops a privacy architecture that separates existence, validity, and contents into independently controllable disclosure tiers, and sketches the doctrinal and regulatory questions that the proposal opens for further scholarship.
The paper is therefore offered as a working architectural proposal. Its doctrinal analysis is preliminary, and its legal questions are identified for further specialist development.
Havyarimana, Jean Claude, Beyond the Will (May 28, 2026).
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