Per Slurpees

In Trusts & Estates this week, we’ve been talking about intestate succession, that is, what happens to your property if you die without a will. This has involved a bunch of examples such as “If D dies intestate and is survived by B, C, X, Y, and Z but is predeceased by A…” It also involves looking at family charts and using a handy thing called a consanguinity table (a visual representation of how extended family members are related to a specific person).

And it requires a lot of mental division of inheritance shares, which can be tricky to keep track of. When one of us gets the proportions mixed up, it is often (as my professor phrases it) “a math problem, not a legal problem.”

One of the inheritance systems we’ve learned uses “parentelas.” The first parentela is the decedent and his/her spouse and children; the second is the decedent’s parents and their children; the third is the decedent’s grandparents and their children; etc. So if there are no living members in the first parentela, you look in the second. If there are no living members there, you look in the third. My professor suggested we think of it as the “tarantula” system, which has been an effective image for getting it stuck in my brain.

We also learned about “per stirpes,” which rhymes with Slurpees but is much less exciting (and not worth explaining.)

When all else fails, there’s the usual fall-back: if there are no living relatives, the property goes to the state. The official word is “escheats”; I don’t know whether its similarity to the word cheating is a coincidence. Virginia, however, is dedicated to the idea that the Commonwealth should not step in and take private property. Virginia will apparently keep going down your family line to infinity looking for relatives to give your possessions to.

In any case, intestate succession is all potentially very complicated and messy. Moral of Trusts & Estates: make a will.

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Professor quotation of the week (during Business Associations): “You’ll see this happen all the time if you go into corporate law, which I hope you DO because if you don’t defend faceless multi-national corporations, who will?”