Adam J. Hirsch, Inheritance: United States Law, in 3 Oxford International Encyclopedia of Legal History 235-40 (Stanley N. Katz ed.
2009).
the Kitab al-Fara᾽id of Sufyan al-Thawri).” Welt des Islams 13
(1971): 26–78.
al-Tabari, Abu Ja῾far. Jami῾ al-bayan ῾an ta᾽wil ay al-qur᾽an (The
Compilation of the Elucidation for the Interpretation of the Verses
of the Qur᾽an). 3d ed., 30 vols. in 12. Cairo: Dar al-Ma῾arif,
1954–1968.
D AV I D S T E P H A N P O W E R S
United States Law
The law of death is immortal. Detailed provisions cover-
ing problems of inheritance featured within the earliest
lex scripta of the ancient world, and Great Britain—the
principal although not exclusive source of early American
thinking on legal matters—had developed a complex cor-
pus of rules on the subject, mixing acts of Parliament with
judge-made law, long before the English settled in the
New World. Those rules were, and remain, indispensable
in any society, both to bring order to the process of redis-
tributing the property of persons upon their deaths and,
more affirmatively, to establish the terms of the relation-
ship that tie generations together—thus facilitating the
seamless continuity of the social fabric over time.
The Colonial Period. America’s settlers brought their
basic concepts of inheritance with them to the New World.
Colonial statutes covering intestacy, will formalization,
dower, and entail suggest that the principal rules govern-
ing inheritance in Great Britain were reproduced in its
Colonies. The settlers were not about to jettison a system
of rules so deeply embedded in their culture; nevertheless,
they understood the social implications of inheritance law
and began to add indigenous elements to it from the begin-
ning, often reflecting the discrete values of individual col-
onies. Several of these legal novelties survived right up
until Independence, despite the tightening of control over
the Colonies by the home government that occurred dur-
ing the eighteenth century.
One innovation emerged as a fringe benefit of the sim-
plified judicial systems established in the New World. In
Great Britain, prior to 1857, jurisdiction over inheritance
was divided: common-law courts claimed authority over a
decedent’s real property, and church courts, expounding
separate rules of ecclesiastical law, disposed of personal
property. Since church courts never took root in the Colo-
nies, authority over inheritance of all of a decedent’s prop-
erty, real and personal, was amalgamated in a single
secular tribunal. This procedure was less cumbersome
than its British analogue, which had occasioned much
criticism. Probate matters generally lay in the hands of
the courts of general jurisdiction, although a few colonies
were already creating specialized courts for this purpose
(such as the orphans’ courts in Pennsylvania, which Con-
tinue to function today). Probate courts in the Colonies
began with narrow powers merely to probate wills, in the
INHERITANCE: United States Law 235
tradition of the church courts. These powers expanded
gradually to include supervision over the process of
probate administration, which probate courts currently
exercise.
During the era of Colonization, British inheritance law
completed a long-standing trend toward greater freedom to
dispose of property at death. Primogeniture (mandatory
inheritance of land by the eldest son) was essentially a thing
of the past by the time the American settlers arrived (its last
vestige disappeared in 1660), and freedom to bequeath
personal property—fixed by local custom—followed the
same trend, becoming universal in Great Britain by 1724.
So far as the records reveal, American settlers embraced
freedom of testation from the beginning. The only limita-
tions were (1) the right of a surviving spouse to a life estate
in a fraction of the decedent’s real property, set by the rules
of dower and curtesy (one third for a widow, all for a wid-
ower if issue was born of the marriage), which the colonists
for the most part reproduced from the common law, and
(2) a testator’s right to withhold testamentary freedom from
the testator’s own descendants by “entailing” land, thereby
restricting it to the landowner’s bloodline. Although several
legal procedures had developed in Great Britain whereby a
subsequent beneficiary could avoid (or “dock”) an entail,
these were cumbersome and expensive. Entails were explic-
itly authorized by statutes in the Colonies. In conservative
Virginia, legislation in 1705 even strengthened the practice,
abolishing the traditional English legal procedures for
docking entails; thereafter, only a special bill of legislation
could break an entail, and a substantial amount of land
was held in this form in this colony in the eighteenth
century, unlike in the New England colonies, where entails
were rare.
The most notable American deviations from the inheri-
tance laws of Great Britain involved the rules of intestacy,
which determine the distribution of a decedent’s estate in
the absence of a will. British intestacy law concentrated
land in the eldest son, an echo of primogeniture. As early
as the seventeenth century, most of the New England colo-
nies, along with Pennsylvania, abolished this rule in favor
of equal descent to all the children, although several colo-
nies continued to favor the eldest son by assigning him a
double portion of the intestate estate, a rule derived from
scripture. In defense of this deviation from common law,
Massachusetts advocates observed that concentration of
land in a frontier society would have discouraged settle-
ment and given younger children less of an incentive to
improve the estates their parents were laboriously carving
out of the wilderness. These arguments made no impres-
sion in the southern colonies, however, where British
intestacy rules prevailed.
Although oral wills had been given effect routinely in the
seventeenth century, most American colonies in the eight-
eenth century enacted analogues of the British statute
236 INHERITANCE: United States Law
of 1677 requiring testators to execute wills covering real
property in writing, in the presence of three witnesses, to
guard against fraud. Virginia’s version of this statute,
which went into effect in 1751, introduced an exception
for a will “wholly writ by the . . . devisor[’]s own hand,”
that is, a will the testator personally writes out in long-
hand, which did not have to be witnessed. This sort of
testamentary instrument, known as a holographic will,
had its origins in European civil law. How Virginians got
wind of the idea and why they chose to implement it
remains unexplored by legal historians. Its virtue was to
offer a quick and cheap (but nevertheless fraud-resistant)
alternative to an executed will in a land with a relatively
low density of lawyers. The innovation survived for the
rest of the Colonial era in the Colony.
Virginia’s other early contribution to inheritance law
involved the reform of dower. In the seventeenth century,
several American colonies experimented briefly with
changes to the doctrine. In Virginia, a 1672 act granted
widows a share of the personal estate absolutely in addi-
tion to a life estate in reality, both in the event of intestacy
and as a forced share under wills. This reform as well
proved a harbinger of things to come.
The American Revolution. The American Revolution
did not occasion a revolution in the law. The reception
statutes continued the authority of Colonial laws previ-
ously in force. Nevertheless, the Revolution freed American
lawmakers to innovate at their pleasure, and republican
ideology had an impact on inheritance law. It was during
the post-Revolutionary period that equal treatment of
children as a rule of intestacy spread out to all the states,
and even the double portion for the eldest son disappeared
from statute books. Simultaneously, entails were abol-
ished in virtually every state. The legislative histories of
several of these acts makes clear that they were spurred on
by egalitarian concerns, no longer restricted to New
Englanders. But these political considerations were also
supplemented by economic ones: the deceptiveness of
entails to a potential lender (who might mistakenly treat
entailed land as collateral) in a burgeoning credit econ-
omy also contributed to their abolition.
A less heralded development was the spread of the holo-
graphic will from Virginia to other states, a movement
that also began during the post-Revolutionary period. The
Revolution probably prepared the ground for legislative
proliferation—as a civil-law implant, holographic wills
would have held less appeal to Colonial governments,
whereas the post-Revolutionary generation of lawmakers
took an interest in civil law. And as a practical matter, the
ease and cheapness of making holographic wills had an
obvious general appeal, even as lawyer density increased.
They have continued to spread and in the early twenty-
first century are recognized as valid in just over half the
states.
The Nineteenth Century. The nineteenth century was
an age of momentous social and economic change in the
United States and, concomitantly, a time of transforma-
tion and innovation in American law. Yet following the
burst of post-Revolutionary lawmaking, especially with
respect to intestacy and entail, inheritance law bucked
this trend, evolving over the course of the century only in
relatively modest ways. The formalities of inheritance law
continued to evolve ever so slightly. The British statute of
1677 setting will formalities, together with its colonial
American counterparts, had applied only to wills covering
real property. Testators could still make wills concerned
solely with the disposition of personal property by oral
declaration. In the nineteenth century, though, most
American states extended the formalities of writing and
witnessing to all wills, irrespective of the nature of the tes-
tator’s property. This extension also occurred in Great
Britain under an 1837 act, but at least some of the
American statutes (including the one in Massachusetts)
predated the British act and hence did not simply mimic
English law. The development signaled the increasing
importance of personal property as the industrial age
arrived but also an American hostility to unnecessary dis-
tinctions between the law’s treatment of realty and per-
sonalty, a distinction that was easier to discern given the
probate court’s merger of jurisdiction over both forms of
property in the United States.
The most notable developments of the nineteenth cen-
tury involved the growing inheritance rights of a surviving
spouse and the rise of the trust as an instrument of estate
planning. In both respects, American law went its own
way in the 1800s.
Virginia’s novel legislation to augment dower rights to
include personal property has already been remarked.
Similar legislation was enacted in the state immediately
after Independence, and North Carolina and Maryland
(where the extension was already in effect as a judicial
doctrine) followed suit. Professor Lewis Simes, who has
traced this historical development, speculates that its
southern origins were no coincidence: there, even before
the Industrial Revolution, personal property in the form
of tobacco and slaves loomed as important components of
household wealth.
The nineteenth century saw the multiplication and pro-
gression of this pattern. One by one, states expanded the
rights of a surviving spouse to a portion of the personal as
well as real property and also expanded the spouse’s share
of real property from a life estate to a fee simple absolute,
both under intestacy statutes and as a forced share. The
shift took decades to complete, and some states (notably
including New York) did not straggle into line until early
in the twentieth century. Dower and curtesy were concur-
rently abolished but replaced by something similar—
homestead rights guaranteeing the surviving spouse a life

estate in the family home (a concept originating in Texas
in 1839). Several western and southwestern states perpet-
uated the community-property system, a vestige of their
prior Hispanic law, under which each spouse gained an
immediate proprietary interest in half the property
acquired during the marriage. In the early twenty-first
century, every state, save one, provides either a forced
share of the entire estate (real and personal property com-
bined) or community property to the surviving spouse,
and dower and curtesy have become virtually extinct. (The
exception is Georgia, which offers no protected inheri-
tance of any sort, apart from a one-year allowance, for a
surviving spouse.) Meanwhile, intestacy rights became
decoupled from the forced share, granting even more to
the surviving spouse in the absence of a will. In many
states the pattern of the post-Revolutionary intestacy stat-
utes has entirely reversed itself: instead of the children
taking to the exclusion of the surviving spouse, the surviv-
ing spouse takes to the exclusion of the children.
Legal historians trace the expansion of the surviving
spouse’s rights to personal property in part to its growing
importance as compared to real property following the
Industrial Revolution, an economic circumstance that
made distinctions based on the form of wealth in a dece-
dent’s estate appear capricious (a matter of “pure acci-
dent,” as a statutory revision commission in Pennsylvania
put it). And the switch to granting rights to inherit prop-
erty absolutely rather than for life (as under dower and
curtesy) may have been a by-product of the same circum-
stance, since life estates in personal property other than
fixtures, when not contained in a trust, were unknown at
common law. In any event, dower had long been contro-
versial for the simple reason that life estates in property
limit alienability and accordingly had been viewed with
disfavor by lawmakers. In addition, dower was unpopular
because of its “inchoate” character; the widow retained
this right even if the property were sold, if she had not
consented to its sale.
Some legal historians assert that the larger women’s
movement also played a role in this development. Although
there is no evidence of an organized effort to promote
inheritance reform, the legislative history of some of the
new statutes indicated a recognition of the contribution of
wives to family wealth: as early as 1784, the preamble to a
North Carolina statute expanding widow’s inheritance
rights remarked that “it is highly just and reasonable that
those who by their Prudence, Œcomony and Industry,
have contributed to raise up an Estate to their Husbands,
should be entitled to share in it.”
The other major legal innovations of the nineteenth cen-
tury occurred within the law of trusts. Private trusts—
whereby the creator (or “settlor”) divides ownership over
property between a beneficiary and a trustee holding legal
title on the beneficiary’s behalf—began in Great Britain as
INHERITANCE: United States Law 237
devices to convey land during life and thereby avoid feu-
dal restrictions on freedom of testation as well as certain
feudal incidents (a medieval form of taxes) otherwise pay-
able upon death. Following the statutory grant of freedom
of testation and the abolition of the feudal incidents, trusts
in Great Britain began to take on some of their modern
functions—a means of managing and protecting the
wealth of minors and incompetents, for example.
In the United States, trusts came into widespread use in
the nineteenth century, assuming “caretaker” functions as
in Great Britain, but also becoming a means of exercising
testamentary “dead hand” control—that is, allowing the
settlor to mandate not only who is to receive property but
also when they shall receive it and even how it must be
spent. American cases in the late nineteenth century estab-
lished the right of the settlor of a trust to fix terms and
conditions for the distribution of trust income that benefi-
ciaries could not avoid by terminating the trust and, in the
same spirit, to create a trust that paid a regular income to
the beneficiary but barred creditors of that beneficiary
from reaching trust assets to satisfy their claims—this last
entity becoming known, appropriately enough, as a
“spendthrift trust.” Some scholars attribute these develop-
ments to the rise of the first great fortunes in the United
States and a concurrent flowering of the dynastic impulse
during the Gilded Age. The mystery remains that in Great
Britain, with its still more ingrained dynastic traditions,
trust law progressed along different lines: under case law
both predating and following the American precedents,
beneficiaries enjoyed the right to terminate trusts, and
spendthrift trusts were ineffective to thwart creditors’
claims. Why this doctrinal divergence occurred remains
to be studied. Ultimately, the trust vehicle proved so useful
and versatile that it spread out from the inheritance realm
to other areas of American law—business trusts emerged
in the nineteenth century, followed by pension trusts and
still other varieties in the twentieth.
Once trusts became active, long-term receptacles for
family wealth transfers, the rules applicable to the man-
agement of the wealth they contained became significant.
In Great Britain, these rules were exceedingly strict: trust-
ees could invest only in government securities. No parallel
rule ever prevailed in the United States. Instead, courts (in
a line of decisions emerging out of Massachusetts) devel-
oped a vaguer requirement of prudent investment that
in some jurisdictions (notably New York) was held to
preclude investment even in blue-chip stocks. Over the
nineteenth century, most states came to regulate trust
investment by statute, typically setting out a “legal list” of
investments under which the prohibition on equity par-
ticipation continued. A few states codified a looser “pru-
dent investor” standard, however.
The Twentieth Century. The twentieth century
witnessed more dramatic changes in inheritance law.
238 INHERITANCE: United States Law
Beginning in the 1940s, the ranks of states abandoning
their legal lists of trust investments in favor of a less
restrictive prudent-investor standard swelled into a large
majority. This development apparently resulted from com-
petitive pressures, since trust yields had become signifi-
cantly higher in prudent-investor states. Since the 1990s,
states have moved to align trust-investment law with
modern portfolio theory. By statute in some forty-four
states, trustees can invest in any security within the gen-
eral standard of prudence, so long as the overall trust
portfolio is diversified.
Other aspects of inheritance law have also adapted to
modern times. Over the years, many gender-based distinc-
tions had crept into statutory law—rules creating gender-
specific intestacy and forced-share provisions, rules
favoring men over women in the selection of executors of
estates, rules making children born out of wedlock heirs by
right of intestacy of their mothers but not their fathers, for
example. Some of these discriminatory provisions were
already disappearing in the nineteenth century, but begin-
ning in the 1970s, affected parties began to challenge the
remaining distinctions as unconstitutional violations of
the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
These challenges succeeded, and legislators—galvanized
by these cases, if not by the manifest inequity of the rules—
responded by revising the statutes to achieve gender neu-
trality in the inheritance realm. Although residual gender
distinctions remain on the books in a few states, these dis-
tinctions are assumed to have fallen into desuetude.
Other legal developments can be traced to changing pat-
terns of American family life. With increased longevity
and a rising rate of divorce, multiple marriages and so-
called blended families have grown far more common in
the United States. Legislators in many states have
responded by enacting more complex intestacy statutes to
interpret probable intent in blended-family situations. In
many states, a different rule of intestate distribution
applies depending on whether the decedent or the surviv-
ing spouse has children who are not also children of the
other—statutory variations that were unknown prior to
the 1970s.
The formalities required to execute a will, having
reached a high-water mark of elaborateness in the nine-
teenth century, ebbed somewhat in the twentieth. The pro-
tocols demanded by wills acts have been pruned back over
time. Whereas no fewer than three witnesses to a will were
required under many nineteenth-century state statutes, as
of the early twenty-first century, two suffice universally,
and other subsidiary requirements have also been elimi-
nated in many states. Courts in the twentieth century have
often winked at technical defects in will execution or have
probated technically defective wills overtly on the ground
of “substantial compliance” with the statutory formalities.
In six jurisdictions, the wills acts themselves authorize the
court to waive statutory requirements where evidence
demonstrates that the will is genuine. These developments
do not hark back to the seventeenth century, when courts
routinely gave effect to oral wills. Modern lawmakers
nonetheless came to recognize that when legal formali-
ties are allowed to grow too complex and rigid, they set
traps for poorly counseled testators and hence can do
more harm than good.
Another development has been the rise (followed by the
decline, if not fall) of the federal estate tax. Congress his-
torically had levied death duties during intervals of mili-
tary crisis, to facilitate spending on national defense. The
first such tax existed between 1797 and 1802 to finance
construction of the American navy. The tax reappeared
from 1862 to 1870, during the Civil War, and again between
1898 and 1902, to help fund the Spanish-American War.
In the Gilded Age, the robber barons amassed fortunes
on a scale unprecedented in American history, and it was
during this period that a social movement to curtail wealth
through permanent estate taxes emerged for the first time.
The movement found allies even from within the ranks
of the titans themselves—Andrew Carnegie was a vocal
supporter—and it began to attract the interest of politicians
such as President Theodore Roosevelt, who proposed a
permanent estate tax in 1906. The tax was not enacted
until 1916, however, on the brink of World War I. This time,
the estate tax was not repealed after the war, though rates
were reduced somewhat, and although rates have contin-
ued to fluctuate over time, the tax itself has remained con-
stantly in effect. Congress simultaneously imposed a gift
tax to prevent individuals from circumventing the estate
tax by giving away their property inter vivos.
Members of wealthy families have nevertheless found
ways to reduce their estate tax liability. By bequeathing to
their grandchildren, while their parents in turn did the
same, families were able to halve the incidence of estate
taxation across the generations. To close this loophole,
Congress added a second tax in 1986, the generation-
skipping transfer tax, in effect double-taxing the estates of
testators who bequeathed directly to their grandchildren.
The struggle to avoid taxes remains, however, a cease-
less one. With the passage of the generation-skipping
transfer tax, accountants sought new ways around the
estate tax, and they received a boost from state legislators,
whose local interests were better served by attracting
capital to their states than by promoting federal revenues.
The unexpected, and seemingly unrelated, consequence
has been the erosion in recent years of the rule against
perpetuities and the concomitant rise of the dynasty
trust.
The rule against perpetuities is a common-law doctrine
that prevents testators from controlling the disposition of
property too far into the future. It did not assume its final,
complicated form under British case law until early in the

nineteenth century, but those precedents were neverthe-
less respected throughout the United States. For some
time, three states—Idaho (as early as 1957), South Dakota,
and Wisconsin have had statutes exempting trusts from
the rule against perpetuities. Since 1986, however, twenty
more states have joined the original trio to offer settlors
the opportunity to extend the duration of trusts, and more
states join the bandwagon each year. This legal movement
has been fueled not by a sudden growth of public demand
to dictate spending decisions by distant descendants or to
create lockboxes of wealth for them but by the eternal
aversion to paying taxes. The generation-skipping transfer
tax only needs to be paid above an initial exemption
amount; if the settlor can create a trust below that level
that never terminates but pays out income in perpetuity to
subsequent generations, the settlor’s descendants will
never have to pay estate taxes again. States began compet-
ing with each other to attract trust dollars to their states in
this way, and the dynasty trust—a sort of throwback to
entail—was born. Some $100 billion of family wealth has
already poured into them in the United States.
Yet the saga of the estate tax continues. Rates have
retreated over time from a high of 77 percent for large
estates, and exemptions have increased to the point where
fewer than 2 percent of all estates are subject to the tax. In
2001 Congress enacted a bizarre law further reducing the
estate tax in stages over nine years, culminating in total
repeal in 2010. In 2011, however, this law expires, and the
2001 estate-tax rates (with a $1 million exemption and a
top bracket of 60 percent) spring back into effect. This law
is quite disruptive of estate planning and seems unlikely
to go forward, and then backward, as scheduled. Whether
and how Congress will amend it remains uncertain.
Still another modern change has concerned the vehicles
used to transfer property upon death. In the twentieth
century, probate courts developed a reputation for slow-
ness, costliness, and in some states outright corruption.
With the publication in 1965 of Norman Dacey’s best
seller, How to Avoid Probate! (a philippic against the pro-
bate system), demand for legal alternatives to probate
intensified.
Legislators were slow to act, so estate planners sought
the assistance of courts to bypass probate without a statu-
tory mandate. Various vehicles were tried, the most impor-
tant of which is the so-called living trust, whose assets can
be spent freely by the settlor but go to named beneficiaries
at death, the settlor retaining the right to amend these
provisions or revoke the trust in its entirety. In substance,
the arrangement resembles a will, since the beneficiary
gains no rights over property prior to the settlor’s death
that the settlor cannot take away at pleasure. Nonetheless,
estate planners asked courts to rule that some sort of
(fictional) right passes immediately and hence that these
arrangements constitute lifetime gifts not subject to the
INHERITANCE: United States Law 239
jurisdiction of a probate court. Living trusts had been in
occasional use for some time, and precedents acknowl-
edging their validity trace back as far as the mid-nineteenth
century. Faced with growing demand, and recognizing
the practical usefulness of avoiding probate, twentieth-
century courts added their assent, and so the “will substi-
tutes” burst onto the scene. Eventually, legislation in most
states confirmed the judicial decisions giving effect to liv-
ing trusts and created new will substitutes. By statute, an
owner can simply append a “pay on death” designation to
assets of various kinds—bank accounts and securities in
most states, contracts and instruments of debt in some
states, and even deeds of real property in a few states—
which will then bypass probate.
One ironic consequence of the “nonprobate revolution”
is that the law of inheritance, unified under the American
amalgamation of jurisdiction historically divided in Great
Britain, has lately begun to fragment. Individual will sub-
stitutes have their own bodies of associated rules, which
do not necessarily correspond with the analogous rules
applicable to wills or even to other will substitutes. How
long this fragmentation will continue is one of the ques-
tion marks of inheritance law in the early twenty-first
century.
Despite some dynamic elements, the most striking char-
acteristic of American inheritance law over its long his-
tory has been sluggishness and constancy. Inheritance
issues have tended to assume a low priority on legislative
agendas—and as a consequence trusts and estates remains
a field crawling with old vines, particularly as concerns its
subordinate doctrines. When, for example, a Massachusetts
court in 2002 had to resolve the very modern problem of
the intestacy rights of children conceived posthumously
through reproductive technology, the judges found them-
selves applying a provision of the intestacy statute enacted
in 1836—when the issues raised by the case were unthink-
able—and not amended since. The judges responded by
construing the relevant statute liberally. In other instances,
courts have sometimes resorted to equitable remedies
(such as the equitable constructive trust) or, as in connec-
tion with living trusts, legal fictions to move inheritance
doctrine along. American treatises on wills published in
the nineteenth century nevertheless recite rules that
remain all too familiar to a reader toiling in the field in the
early twenty-first century. The same cannot be said of
other major fields of law, altered beyond recognition over
the course of American history.
As American inheritance law embarks upon a new mil-
lennium, the scope offered for freedom of testation
remains as broad as it has ever been, and it is indeed
a scope without parallel elsewhere in the Western world.
Here, and here alone, a testator of sound mind can dis-
inherit even minor children at will; here, and here alone,
the restraints against perpetual dead-hand control are
240 INHERITANCE: United States Law
crumbling. And given the power to mandate with specific-
ity the use of wealth held in trust, coupled with relatively
low estate taxes, the United States stands out as a country
peculiarly deferential to the wishes of the dead.
In light of this persistent latitude, the key patterns and
trends may not be primary ones concerning evolution of
law, but rather secondary ones concerning evolution of
testamentary behavior. That in itself is a large subject,
about which it is dangerous to generalize, and about
which much more research needs to be done. If one trend
stands out over the course of American history, however, it
is the emerging centrality of the surviving spouse (in par-
ticular, widows) in estate plans. Husbands leave more
property to their widows outright (not just for life) than
they did in the early twentieth century, and this trend was
already gathering pace in the nineteenth century. Although
the trend has only limited implications for the intergen-
erational transmission of wealth, it has both reflected
and reinforced a profound shift in power within what
John Stuart Mill called the “little commonwealth” of the
family.
Some scholars maintain that inheritance law has waned
in significance in modern times. As Americans live longer,
more wealth is consumed during life, and property that
loved ones would otherwise inherit goes to them earlier to
pay for college tuition and other current expenses. Yet the
generation that came of age during World War II enjoyed
unparalleled economic prosperity after the war and
amassed equally unparalleled wealth, much of which
remains unspent. The “greatest generation” is concluding
its remarkable era with the greatest intergenerational
wealth transfer in American history.
[See also Succession, subentry on Family Law in the
United States; Taxation, subentry on United States Law;
and Trusts in English Common Law.]
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A D A M J. H I R S C H
IN IU R IA. See Delict, subentry on Roman Law.
INNS OF COURT. The Inns of Court, which still
exist, are colleges to which all barristers are required to
belong; they possess the power of calling members to the
Bar and provide facilities for students and practitioners.
There are four of them, the Inner Temple, the Middle
Temple, Gray’s Inn, and Lincoln’s Inn, all situated between
the city of London and Westminster. Most of their build-
ings now serve as chambers (professional accommoda-
tion) for practicing barristers. But from the mid-fourteenth
century until the mid-seventeenth these inns, together with
the Inns of Chancery, constituted a residential law school
not much smaller than the entire University of Cambridge.
They also provided town lodgings for practicing members
of the Bar and offices for senior clerks and attorneys of the
central courts. Around 1600 they were sometimes referred
to unofficially as the Third University of England, and Sir
Edward Coke boasted in 1602 that they were “the most
famous university, for the profession of law only, or any
one humane science, that is in the world.”
Education in the mysteries of the common law began
around the middle of the thirteenth century, though