Roman Law and the Legal World of the Romans

Inheritance

ability to inherit from each other. Perhaps more important was a law of the mid second century bc that forbade women to be made heirs in the wills of wealthy persons (though they could still collect under the rules of intestate inheritance; see the fol lowing section). The law seems to have gone out of force by the beginning of the empire.

Intestate Succession

“Intestate succession” is the distribution of property when someone dies without a usable will. “Intestate” means “with out a will”; “succession” refers to the passing down of the prop erty. This situation arises when someone dies without leaving behind a will or if the will is invalid for some reason. So the persons who challenged a will in court were normally the per sons who would benefit under the rules of intestate succession. If the will were to be ruled invalid for any reason, they could then collect automatically. The precise rules for intestate succession changed some what over time (and I will discuss some of those changes later), but the general shape of the system remained the same. The general idea was that, if there was no will, the property would go to the nearest relative, who would become an “heir” in the sense just discussed [20] . If there was more than one equally close relative (say, three children of a deceased father), then they became joint heirs in equal shares. As part of the defini tion of what counted as a “close” relative, the law divided the

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