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Nonmarital Children And Post-Death Parentage: A Different Path For Inheritance Law?, Paula A. Monopoli

Faculty Scholarship

Historically, nonmarital children were treated as “filius nullius,” the child of no one. American jurisprudence has evolved to embrace these children and to err on the side of treating them in the same manner as marital children. Much of inheritance law is concerned with establishing a parent-child relationship in order to determine one’s eligibility to inherit. The 1970s saw several United States Supreme Court cases address the issue of state inheritance statutes that imposed a higher burden on nonmarital children in establishing a parent-child relationship for purposes of inheritance. Some of these state statutes incorporated “surrogate” rules for divining whether …