What Should Inheritance Law Be? Reparations and Intergenerational Wealth Transfers

The question "What should inheritance law be?" invites wide-ranging discussion and perhaps even destabilizing questions about property rights. For the question invites speculation about why inheritance law is the way it is and whose interests it protects. We usually accept the distribution of wealth, and almost everyone agrees that broad protection for inheritance rights is both necessary and proper. Sometimes courts and legislatures impose limitations on rights of testators to distribute their property. One example that was important in the years before the Civil War was the restriction against slaveholders freeing their slaves. The effect of that restriction on testators' power was to keep property within the testator's family and to prevent redistribution of property to enslaved people. In other places in the nineteenth century-often in fictional literature-Americans expressed skepticism of inheritance. More recently, some scholars and activists have called for redistribution of wealth to remedy our country's history of slavery and Jim Crow. We embrace inheritance of benefits from previous generations-both in terms of individual family wealth that is inherited and in terms of bounties given our nation by the labor of previous generations. We are less willing to embrace obligations, however.