Family Law And Inheritance In America

Download or read book Family, Law, and Inheritance in America written by Yvonne Pitts and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-20 with total page 219 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.