Category Archives: Succession
Mark Glover, ‘Uncooperative Heirs and Ignored Inheritances’
ABSTRACT Heirs can be categorized by how they respond to their inheritances. Most heirs gladly accept their inheritances. Others, for various reasons, disclaim their inheritances by formally rejecting them, and their inheritances are distributed to alternate heirs. Still others fail to claim their inheritances because they cannot be located at the time of estate administration, […]
Jean Claude Havyarimana, ‘Beyond the Will’
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 […]
Joel Patterson, ‘Intestacy and the Modern Household’
ABSTRACT When a person dies in England and Wales without a valid will, their estate is distributed under section 46 of the Administration of Estates Act 1925, as amended. The rules are commonly described as a safety net. They are better described as a specific distribution scheme, drafted around a specific household — married or […]
Joel Patterson, ‘The Will Discovery Problem’
ABSTRACT English law examines a will’s validity with great care and its findability not at all. The formalities of execution are policed at a single ceremony; what happens to the document afterwards — where it is kept, who knows it exists, whether anyone can produce it when its maker dies — is nobody’s statutory business. […]
Andreas Giannakopoulos, ‘The recognition of foreign succession judgments at common law’
ABSTRACT This article examines whether the common law recognises a category of foreign judgments ‘in matters of’ succession. Its argument is that it does not: the relevant question of characterisation is whether the orders contained in the foreign judgment are in rem or in personam. Where a foreign ‘succession’ judgment is partly in rem and […]
Adam Hirsch, ‘Advances On Inheritances: Policy, Empirical Evidence, And The Quest For Consistency’
ABSTRACT This Article explores the problem of benefactors who make gifts to those who eventually inherit from them, either as heirs under intestacy statutes or as beneficiaries under wills. Are gifts treated as advances on inheritances and deducted from the amount heirs or beneficiaries eventually receive? Or do gifts supplement inheritances as separate and unrelated […]
‘Cash For Compliance, Buying Obedience After Death’
William A Drennan, ‘RIP – A Financial Incentive to Protect Your Cadaver?’, 129 Penn State Law Review 667 (2025). Who wouldn’t want to control things, even after death? The chance that your surviving family will not obey your wishes after you die is exactly why you create a last will and testament. We all long […]
Grzegorz Gluszak, ‘Vesting of property in personal representatives and trustees compared: the core distinction, its doctrinal justification, and practical consequences’
ABSTRACT Personal representatives (executors and administrators) have been treated as and confused with trustees for centuries. While recent cases signify the shift towards recognition of the distinctive nature and functions of the two offices, a great deal of confusion and ambiguity remains. Why are they different? How exactly are they different? Are there clear criteria […]
Chris Dent, ‘Governmentality and the Common Law: Expansion of “Mind” 1835-1885’
ABSTRACT The nineteenth century saw significant changes in how the law articulated the assessment of those who came before the courts. The judges made greater, and more refined, use of the concept of the mind as a way to refer to the internal lives of the parties. Using a Foucauldian lens, judgments from the sub-disciplines […]
Emily Stolzenberg, ‘Children as Non-owners in US Family Law and Inheritance Law’
ABSTRACT US family law and inheritance law take seemingly opposite approaches to support of minor children. Living parents must provide support, but almost every state permits testators to disinherit even minor children. This Chapter, a contribution to the Edward Elgar Research Handbook on Family Law and Finances, resolves the tension: both strands of family property […]