Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

own immediate heirs. He could not dictate where the property would go when they in turn died. A will might be challenged in court after the writer’s death. This could be done on formal or substantive grounds. An informal convention arose that at least one-quarter of the estate should go to the immediate descendants of the deceased unless there were some specific reason otherwise. If they did not get their share and the will did not offer an (adequate) justi fication, they could challenge the “undutiful” will in court. In such cases, the persons trying to break the will were arguing directly for their own interests. Those who argued that a will was invalid on technical grounds (say, failure to use the stan dard formulas or the legal incompetence of the deceased) pre sumably had similar interests, but thought that they would be more likely to succeed by an indirect approach. The courts did not attempt to “fix” defective wills; they only decided whether the will was (entirely) valid or (entirely) invalid. Other restrictions were also put in place from time to time that had little to do with the goals of inheritance law as such. The law punished certain people (e.g., convicted criminals) and discouraged certain kinds of behavior (e.g., childless ness, beginning from the time of the emperor Augustus) by restricting the ability to receive inheritances. This kind of rule might be compared to the use of tax policy today as a way to encourage or discourage certain actions without requiring or forbidding them outright (say, buying a house or dipping into retirement savings, respectively). So couples that were child less or of too-diverse statuses had limited (and sometimes no)

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