This symposium paper, originally presented at the September 19, 2008 NYU Tax Law Review Symposium on inheritance taxation, begins to examine what it might mean for the law to protect a "right to use one's resources to benefit one's family." The paper draws on historical debates over inheritance...

This paper reviews Hartog’s 2012 book, Someday All this will be Yours: A History of Inheritance and Old Age. Relying on case documents from trial courts in New Jersey in the early twentieth century, Hartog tells the rich stories behind these cases. The cases involve claims by family members,...

A society's values may be discernible in its intestacy laws, the laws which govern the distribution of a decedent’s estate when there is no valid will. Upon examination, unique characteristics among competing intestacy schemes emerge. The most startling characteristic of Chinese inheritance...

It has long been known that most of the private law content of the Theodosian Code has not been preserved independently of the Lex Romana Visigothorum, or Breviary of Alaric. Certain constitutions, not contained in the Breviary but dating to the period covered by the Theodosian Code, have...

We use inheritance patterns over three generations of individuals to assess the impact of changes in the Hindu Succession Act that grant daughters equal coparcenary birth rights in joint family property that were denied to daughters in the past. We show that the amendment significantly increased...

This essay, written for the Encyclopedia of Legal History, summarizes and examines the history of inheritance law in the United States, from colonial times to the present day. The essay suggests that while British statutory and common law was the main source of American inheritance law - as one...

Using a counterfactual approach based on propensity score matching with Rosenbaum bounds in a cross section of 134 countries, we study the causal effect of colonisation on contemporary subjective happiness. Findings reveal that the settled countries, specifically former French colonies,...