Author: Ralph Brashier
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592137830
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
How inheritance law has failed to recognize the modern family.

Author: Yvonne Pitts
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107035503
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
Yvonne Pitts explores nineteenth-century inheritance practices by focusing on testamentary capacity trials in Kentucky in which disinherited family members challenged relatives' wills, claiming the testator lacked the capacity required to write a valid will. By anchoring the study in the history of local communities and the texts of elite jurists, Pitts demonstrates that "capacity" was a term laden with legal meaning and competing communal values.

Author: Jacqueline Stevens
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231148771
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
As citizens, we hold certain truths to be self-evident: that the rights to own land, marry, inherit property, and especially to assume birthright citizenship should be guaranteed by the state. The laws promoting these rights appear not only to preserve our liberty but to guarantee society remains just. Yet considering how much violence and inequality results from these legal mandates, Jacqueline Stevens asks whether we might be making the wrong assumptions. Would a world without such laws be more just? Arguing that the core laws of the nation-state are more about a fear of death than a desire for freedom, Jacqueline Stevens imagines a world in which birthright citizenship, family inheritance, state-sanctioned marriage, and private land ownership are eliminated. Would chaos be the result? Drawing on political theory and history and incorporating contemporary social and economic data, she brilliantly critiques our sentimental attachments to birthright citizenship, inheritance, and marriage and highlights their harmful outcomes, including war, global apartheid, destitution, family misery, and environmental damage. It might be hard to imagine countries without the rules of membership and ownership that have come to define them, but as Stevens shows, conjuring new ways of reconciling our laws with the condition of mortality reveals the flaws of our present institutions and inspires hope for moving beyond them.

Author: Harry L Munsinger J D, PH D
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781480898417
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Experts estimate that eighty percent of household wealth is inherited, and the average American who died in 2015 left approximately $177,000 to his or her family. Harry L. Munsinger, a lawyer practicing in Texas, explores the history of inheritance law in this fascinating book. Topics include: - English laws of succession, which evolved to favor wealthy families by passing real estate and family titles to the eldest surviving son. In contrast, the American colonies developed a democratic system of inheritance where land was divided equally among all the sons. - Goals of early inheritance laws, which were to keep ancestral lands in the family and to determine who would take the land when a father died. - Ways American laws of succession followed English common law during the colonial period and then developed variations more suited to America's social and economic needs after the colonies won their independence from Britain. The author also highlights how any interested party can allege a defect in the execution of a will, how trusts were developed by courts of equity to avoid the rigid rules of English common law governing legal title and use of real property, and how families can safely and effectively transfer wealth.

Author: Melinda Cooper
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1942130058
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 449

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Book Description
An investigation of the roots of the alliance between free-market neoliberals and social conservatives. Why was the discourse of family values so pivotal to the conservative and free-market revolution of the 1980s and why has it continued to exert such a profound influence on American political life? Why have free-market neoliberals so often made common cause with social conservatives on the question of family, despite their differences on all other issues? In this book, Melinda Cooper challenges the idea that neoliberalism privileges atomized individualism over familial solidarities, and contractual freedom over inherited status. Delving into the history of the American poor laws, she shows how the liberal ethos of personal responsibility was always undergirded by a wider imperative of family responsibility and how this investment in kinship obligations is recurrently facilitated the working relationship between free-market liberals and social conservatives. Neoliberalism, she argues, must be understood as an effort to revive and extend the poor law tradition in the contemporary idiom of household debt. As neoliberal policymakers imposed cuts to health, education, and welfare budgets, they simultaneously identified the family as a wholesale alternative to the twentieth-century welfare state. And as the responsibility for deficit spending shifted from the state to the household, the private debt obligations of family were defined as foundational to socioeconomic order. Despite their differences, neoliberals and social conservatives were in agreement that the bonds of family needed to be encouraged—and at the limit enforced—as a necessary counterpart to market freedom. In a series of case studies ranging from Bill Clinton's welfare reform to the AIDS epidemic and from same-sex marriage to the student loan crisis, Cooper explores the key policy contributions made by neoliberal economists and legal theorists. Only by restoring the question of family to its central place in the neoliberal project, she argues, can we make sense of the defining political alliance of our times, that between free-market economics and social conservatism.

Author: David S. Clark
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 076192387X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 1809

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Book Description
Introduction to and survey of the field of law and society. Includes interdisciplinary perspectives on law from sociology, criminology, cultural anthropology, political science, social psychology, and economics.

Author: Ralph Brashier
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1592132227
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Nontraditional families are today an important part of American family life. Yet when a loved one dies, our inheritance laws are often stingy even towards survivors in the nuclear family. With humor, enthusiasm, and a bit of righteous outrage, Ralph C. Brashier explores how probate laws ignore gender roles and marital contributions of the spouse, often to the detriment of the surviving widow; how probate laws pretend that unmarried couples—particularly gay and lesbian ones—do not exist; how probate laws allow a parent to disinherit even the neediest child; and how probate laws for nonmarital children, adopted children, and children born of surrogacy or other forms of assisted reproductive technology are in flux or simply don't exist. A thoughtful examination of the current state of probate law and the inability of legislators to recognize and provide for the broad range of families in America today, this book will be read by those with an interest in the relationship between families and the law across a wide range of academic disciplines.

Author: Ann Numhauser-Henning
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1785369091
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 431

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Book Description
The ageing population poses a huge challenge to law and society, carrying important structural and institutional implications. This book portrays elder law as an emerging research discipline in the European setting in terms of both conceptual and theoretical perspectives as well as elements of the law.

Author: Heather Keating
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317047052
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
This volume considers the impact that changing family norms have had on the responsibilities that the law allocates to people in family relationships. Contributions are drawn from a wide variety of jurisdictions in which scholars, lawyers, judges and policy-makers have been trying to discern what the appropriate correlation should be between the responsibilities that people undertake in family settings and the law that regulates family responsibilities. Part I looks at the changes that have occurred in adult relationships and what they have done for our sense of the family responsibilities that adults take for one another. Part II reflects on the changing nature of the parental relationship in order to reconsider the way in which changing family structures affect the responsibilities we think people raising children should have. The third part brings the rights discourse that has dominated jurisprudence for much of the last fifty years into the discussion of family transformation and the responsibilities to which it gives rise. In the final section the authors reflect on the difficulties of trying to resolve the meaning of responsibility in a world of changing families. The collection brings together some of the most eminent and imaginative scholars and judges working in this area. It will be a valuable resource for all those interested in the legal regulation of the transforming family.

Author: Mr Craig Lind
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409497372
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
This volume considers the impact that changing family norms have had on the responsibilities that the law allocates to people in family relationships. Contributions are drawn from a wide variety of jurisdictions in which scholars, lawyers, judges and policy-makers have been trying to discern what the appropriate correlation should be between the responsibilities that people undertake in family settings and the law that regulates family responsibilities. Part I looks at the changes that have occurred in adult relationships and what they have done for our sense of the family responsibilities that adults take for one another. Part II reflects on the changing nature of the parental relationship in order to reconsider the way in which changing family structures affect the responsibilities we think people raising children should have. The third part brings the rights discourse that has dominated jurisprudence for much of the last fifty years into the discussion of family transformation and the responsibilities to which it gives rise. In the final section the authors reflect on the difficulties of trying to resolve the meaning of responsibility in a world of changing families. The collection brings together some of the most eminent and imaginative scholars and judges working in this area. It will be a valuable resource for all those interested in the legal regulation of the transforming family.