Sherman Gordon died in 1974 at the age of twenty-eight, a victim of homicide. He had no will to cover his meager estate, which consisted only of a Plymouth worth about $2,500. Sherman was survived by his infant daughter, Deta Mona, who lived with him, and by his parents and siblings. Under probate law then existing in Illinois, Sherman’s parents and siblings received the vehicle and Deta Mona received nothing. Why? Because Deta Mona wasillegitimateat a time when law and society preferred to ignore the existence of nonmarital children. Spurred on by the law’s refusal to recognize her...

Country singer Conway Twitty—whose estate was probated under his real name, Harold Jenkins—died in 1993, leaving everything by will to his mother and his four adult children from a prior marriage. Twitty’s will left nothing to Dolores, his wife. Dolores, however, claimed part of Twitty’s estate. When estate litigation came before the Tennessee Court of Appeals, the court did not inquire why Twitty had excluded Dolores from his bounty. The court showed no interest in Dolores’s own wealth or her need for a part of the Twitty estate. Such inquiries were irrelevant: Dolores was Twitty’s surviving spouse, and...

Margie and Sam had lived together in a spouse-like relationship for more than thirty-three years when Sam died in 1980. Margie and Sam, who were uneducated, did not marry because they believed Margie could not obtain a divorce from a husband who had abandoned her years before and whose whereabouts they did not know. During Margie and Sam’s partnership, Margie did the couple’s cooking, washing, and ironing, and the two shared their assets and liabilities. Like most couples, Margie and Sam never entered into a contract to pay each other for their services.

Referring to her relationship with Sam, Margie...

Sometimes American parents disinherit their children. The disinheritance usually goes off without a hitch; occasionally, however, it backfires on the parent. When Joan Crawford disinherited her adult daughter Christina, Christina penned a best-selling exposé of Crawford’s abusiveness that would forever taint the way film buffs think of the actress. If Crawford had been able to read the tea leaves, perhaps she would have attempted to “buy” her daughter’s silence by providing for Christina in her will.¹

Sometimes parents disinherit their veryyoungchildren—children who, unlike Christina, can’t fend for themselves. For example, a noncustodial father may prefer to ignore...

Until the last part of the twentieth century, it was easy to identify father-child relationships in most families. If Hank and Wanda married and Wanda then gave birth to Boyd and Gert, the law almost always concluded that Boyd and Gert must be Hank’s children and potential heirs. Even today, the law typically begins by presuming that Hank is the father of Boyd and Gert. But now we also admit what we’ve always known—that husbands and wives sometimes play around—and we often have the scientific means of proving whether the child in question is biologically related toboth...

At first blush, it might seem odd to characterize families with an adopted child as nontraditional. Yet adoptive families are relatively new in American probate history, and state inheritance laws are far from uniform in the rights they afford to adopted children and their adoptive and biological relatives. Of course, some adoptive families are nontraditional by any standard. In a Minnesota case from the 1970s, Robert, a twenty-nine-year-old man, sought to adopt Maxine, his fifty-three-year-old mother. The state supreme court concluded that the state adoption statute authorized the adoption. Robert’s mother would become his daughter following the adoption. But why...

In 1978 Louise Brown, the first child conceived outside a mother’s womb, was born in Great Britain. Medical breakthrough? Ethical nightmare? Observers disagreed. Within a few years, however, in vitro fertilization (IVF) became an accepted part of fertility treatment. By the end of the twentieth century IVF and other reproductive technologies—some of them also controversial—had led to the births of thousands of children. The next step in reproductive technology is likely to be human cloning. Beginning with Dolly the sheep in 1996, the list of cloned mammals now includes pigs, goats, cows, a mule, a horse, and even...

The family is at the core of most of our lives. We are born into a family whose members we do not choose, under circumstances over which we have no control. In these particulars, some of us are lucky, some are not. We become adults and create families of our own. Most of us couple and marry and, like our parents, create children who have no say in the matter. Our children grow up and create families of their own. Along the journey, unexpected twists and turns arise. Today our families often fracture or blend with others, and we may...