Blood, Behavior, and Inheritance Laws
Part I will present common law exceptions to an inheritance based solely on blood. Beyond degrees of blood relationship, the common law did not consider all blood the same; certain blood was superior. Moreover, sometimes disruptive actions of some blood relations could result in their disinheritance, or worse. Blood was important as the starting point, but behavior played a role as well.
Part II will consider two nineteenth-century developments in United States inheritance laws that breached the bloodline: adoption and spouse-as-heir. This expansion of heirs beyond the common law blood relatives was a significant development reflecting a new paradigm of family for a new republic.
Part III will discuss another important aspect of nineteenth-century inheritance laws. Alongside the additions to heirs by adoption and marriage, nineteenth-century intestate law in the United States began to formalize a disinheritance norm, the murderous heir. This double helix of heirship addition and subtraction in the nineteenth century provides a direct doctrinal link to the role behavior, positive and negative, plays in inheritance. The twentieth century has two newer types of disinheritance statutes enacted in a minority of jurisdictions, abandoning parents and elder abuse. These twentieth-century additions reflect a theory of disinheritance based on an heir’s harmful conduct to a vulnerable person. Disinheritance is viewed from a perspective of destructive conduct vis-a-vis the particular decedent, and not from the social contract perspective of breaking the king’s peace. This newer interpretation is squarely within the expressive function of law and moves intestacy, gently and nonradically, towards a more particularized disposition of a decedent’s property.
Part IV concludes with a consideration of the place behavior may have in the development of inheritance law.