Subject Area
Animal Law; Estates and Trusts; Family Law, Legislation, Property Law and Real Estate
Abstract
This Article argues that millions of American pets should inherit. For many Americans today, their pets, not their human family members, are their nearest and dearest. In earlier work, I have argued that American inheritance law is trapped in an outdated family paradigm. That paradigm assumes that the decedent’s closest relatives by blood, adoption, or marriage are the most deserving recipients of the decedent’s estate, the so-called ‘“natural objects of the decedent’s bounty.’” Using a humanistic approach, I have shown that this abstract vision of “natural” wealth distribution permeates law and decisionmaking and creates significant human costs. By ignoring the actual relationships between decedents and survivors, the family paradigm excludes the very people a particular decedent may have valued most—those connected by affection and support rather than by family status. This Article extends my critique. It argues that the family paradigm also fails to recognize survivors many Americans regard as their closest companions, friends, and even family—their pets.
Part II presents my critique of the family paradigm. It shows how that paradigm excludes decedents’ nonhuman as well as human loved ones. The result is an inheritance system that defeats decedents’ wishes and leaves their most beloved companions unprotected.
Part III turns to recent reform strategies. It analyzes those strategies as pursuing three main goals: (1) enforcing pet care arrangements on an ad hoc basis; (2) improving legal mechanisms to provide for decedents’ pets; and (3) redefining the legal status of pets. Part III concludes that these strategies offer only partial solutions because they fail to challenge the family paradigm.
Part IV offers a new approach. It attacks the very foundation of American inheritance law—the narrow status-based definition of “natural objects of the decedent’s bounty.” Drawing on recent studies, this Part demonstrates that many Americans are now as close or closer to their pets than their human family members. Part IV then considers possible new directions for an inheritance system that regards inheritance by pets as “natural.” Part V concludes that reformers must look beyond the family paradigm’s abstractions and develop more individualized approaches that encompass a decedent’s actual natural objects―be they human or nonhuman.
Recommended Citation
Frances H. Foster,
Should Pets Inherit?,
63 Fla. L. Rev.
801
(2011).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/flr/vol63/iss4/1