Family, Law, and Inheritance in America
A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky

Yvonne Pitts explores nineteenth-century Kentucky inheritance practices by focusing on testamentary capacity trials in which disinherited family members challenged relatives' wills.

Yvonne Pitts (Author)

9781107035508, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 May 2013

213 pages, 2 b/w illus. 1 map 11 tables
23.5 x 15.7 x 1.8 cm, 0.51 kg

'Family, Law, and Inheritance in America is an excellent example of the new legal history that brings law and legal culture alive through the experiences of average people who, for better or for worse, found themselves and their lives recast through the prism of nineteenth century courts and legal categories. Pitts examines hundreds of wills drawn in two counties in Kentucky during the nineteenth century to see how testamentary bequests revealed complex social and familial relationships.' Danaya C. Wright, Law and History Review

Yvonne Pitts explores inheritance practices by focusing on nineteenth-century testamentary capacity trials in Kentucky in which disinherited family members challenged relatives' wills. These disappointed heirs claimed that their departed relative lacked the capacity required to write a valid will. These inheritance disputes criss-crossed a variety of legal and cultural terrains, including ordinary people's understandings of what constituted insanity and justice, medical experts' attempts to infuse law with science, and the independence claims of women. Pitts uncovers the contradictions in the body of law that explicitly protected free will while simultaneously reinforcing the primacy of blood in mediating claims to inherited property. By anchoring the study in local communities and the texts of elite jurists, Pitts demonstrates that 'capacity' was a term laden with legal meaning and competing communal values about family, race relations and rationality. These concepts evolved as Kentucky transitioned from a conflicted border state with slaves to a developing free-labor, industrializing economy.

Introduction
1. 'Parental justice': inheritance and obligation in families
2. 'My black family': manumissions and freedom in inheritance disputes
3. The arbiters of sanity: medical experts and jurists
4. Physical impairments and degenerate minds: the body as evidence
5. A special power: women's testamentary capacity
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK]