SuzanneLenon and DanielMonk (eds), Inheritance Matters: Kinship, Property, Law, Oxford, Hart Publishing, 2023, 326 pp, hb, £90.00

When the law regulates the inheritance of property after death, notions of individual autonomy and familial obligation readily come into conflict. The temporal location of the legal intervention – after death – provides a further complicating factor in this conflict, because the individual whose autonomy is central is no longer a legal subject at the time of legal intervention. Relatedly, as societal and legal understandings of 'family', family life, and the nature of relationships between family members evolve, so then do understandings of duties owed by parents to children, and by children to parents, both during life and after death. These evolving understandings have significant implications for what may be considered a morally and ethically appropriate system of inheritance. Separately, but not unrelatedly, as the economic structures of contemporary societies become ever more focused upon property ownership, and the value of residential property has substantially increased over the most recent generation, the legal rules governing inheritance now have practical significance for more people than at any previous time. It is clear, therefore, why inheritance is a subject worthy of analysis and evaluation both socially and legally. However, despite this context, the opening sentence of Inheritance Matters: Kinship, Property, Law sets out that: 'inheritance rarely takes centre stage in academic studies' (1). This absence of academic consideration provides the foundation on which this edited collection rests. The editors, Suzanne Lenon and Daniel Monk, together with their contributors, seek to redress this absence, and to centre inheritance within contemporary (mostly legal) scholarship by clearly analysing and articulating the different dimensions of inheritance as both a legal and social concept. As the editors set out in their introduction – 'in curating this diverse collection of essays, bringing together international scholars across numerous disciplines, we want to make the case for thinking about inheritance as foundational' (1). This is an ambitious goal, and the collection's title invokes that of Katherine O'Donovan's, Family Law Matters (London: Pluto Press, 1993) – over 30 years after the publication of that foundational text, which sought to reconceptualise dominant understandings of family law, this edited collection has similarly expansive aims for our understandings of inheritance. After this introductory chapter ('Why Inheritance?'), the collection comprises 15 substantive chapters divided into five parts. These are: Part 1 'Foregrounding Inequalities – Past and Present'; Part 2 'Legal Fiction and Wills in Fiction'; Part 3 'Resistance, Rights and Agency'; Part 4 'Adjudicating Inheritance/Adjudicating "Family" '; and Part 5 'Looking Backgrounds Into The Future'. Within these five parts, the chapters range widely in: (i) the disciplinary perspectives they bring to inheritance – legal, anthropological, historical, sociological; (ii) the jurisdictions that are considered – the UK, the US, Ireland, Canada, France, India, and the Scandinavian countries; and (iii) the specific aspects of inheritance that are discussed by the different authors. This breadth of coverage is to be commended, and it renders the collection both international and interdisciplinary. However, at the same time, this breadth makes teasing out thematic unity and cohesion across such a diverse range of essays – including for the immediate purposes of this book review – more complex. With the basic structure of the collection established, it is neither possible nor desirable in this review to consider the detail and nuance of the individual and specific arguments made across the different chapters. Inevitably, in approaching a collection such as this, the reader will be influenced by their own specific perspectives and interests. As such, as a family law academic, my review will focus upon the chapters considering different dimensions of the legal regulation of inheritance. Within this, I will explore two key (and related) themes which I believe are identifiable as recurring across the chapters of the collection. The first theme is the relationship between the legal regulation of inheritance and the legal, social, and cultural understandings and constructions of 'the family', which clearly resonates throughout the collection. In other words, what (if anything) can the regulation of inheritance illuminate about the law's understanding of 'the family' itself. The second theme addresses what the regulation of inheritance can illustrate about the relationship between the (private) family and the (public) state, and how the contours of this relationship have shifted and developed in different jurisdictions across time. In other words, how (if at all) has the regulation of inheritance changed as the relationship(s) between the individual, the family, and the state have changed. The relationship between inheritance and legal understandings and constructions of the 'family' echoes throughout the collection and is explicitly reflected in the title of Part 4 ('Adjudicating "Family" '). In Chapter 3, '"My Reputed Children": Legacies of Enslavement in Atlantic-Island Wills', Anne Bottomley provides a fascinating historical account of how wills provided for (or did not provide for) the 'illegitimate' families (as they would then have been) born on Caribbean islands to British fathers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Drawing upon extensive analysis of the language used in wills themselves, the chapter explores the complex relationship between the legal construction of 'family' (which at that point excluded children born outside of marriage) and the use of wills to provide some recognition of such children; with Bottomley noting, 'in documents such as wills, "reputed children" came to mean something more than merely "natural", whilst always less than "lawful" ' (59). In this context, the issues were rendered even more complex by the dynamics of race and slavery that underpinned most of the familial relationships that these wills related to. Thus, Bottomley's chapter provides an illustrative example of how inheritance could be used to provide some form of familial status and recognition to certain individuals, even when recognition was not possible as a matter of formal legal status during the deceased's life. Chapter 9, 'Sentimental Value: Keeping Inheritance in the Family', explores a different aspect the relationship between inheritance and the family – how the law responds (or does not respond) to the complex emotional terrain which often underpins inheritance disputes. The authors, Sarah Gilmartin and Anita Purewal, observe that: 'the law, however, does not provide a "sentimental solution" to disputes over inherited property, leaving beneficiaries and their representatives to navigate the same at time of often great emotional upset' (189). However, the chapter also notes that the (predominantly English) case law considered is not entirely ignorant of the sentimentality attached by some individuals to inheritance (particularly to specific items of property). While it may be trite to observe that the law often struggles to appropriately respond to situations where people's emotional responses (understandably) diverge from what may be considered to be rational and/or appropriate, it is clear that significance continues to be imbued into law as the mechanism of resolving emotional and familial disputes, including those regarding inheritance. Therefore, the law continues to possess a significant role in shaping social, cultural, and familial expectations of family relationships and familial obligations (including those after death), despite seemingly lacking the necessary tools and frameworks to provide many people with the results (or the emotional closure) that they desire in the aftermath of death. Interestingly, when considering inheritance, the law is understood as a mechanism of determining both the boundaries of family relationships and some of the appropriate content (at least in terms of obligations) of such relationships. Apart from these two chapters, the relationship between the regulation of inheritance and legal, cultural and social understandings of 'the family' is more widely apparent throughout the collection, for example, in Chapter 2 concerning the impact of legal definitions of the 'family' on different types of family ('high-wealth' and 'lower-income') in the USA; Chapter 7 which explores the meaning of inheritance for care-experienced people in the UK; and Chapter 17 which involves an ethnographic approach to studying matrilineal traditions in the India state of Kerala. This relationship between inheritance and understandings of the 'family' inevitably also leads to a more overarching and conceptual question – what role should law have in relation to inheritance? Consideration of this question brings us in turn to the second theme that I identified above, namely the relationship between the family and the state in the regulation of inheritance. Several chapters consider, in different ways, what inheritance tells us about this relationship between public and private – and the extent to which the law both can and should interfere with the autonomy of the testator; often described as 'testamentary freedom'. In this context, as the editors note, there is a 'contrasting emphasis in civil and common law traditions between parental obligation and rights, respectively' (2). Within the collection, specific consideration of the approach of common law jurisdictions to the question of testamentary freedom is more prominent. To that end, in Chapter 10, 'How Social Norms and Values Influence the Balance between Wills Variation Claimants and Testators', Allison A. Cartier examines the legislative regimes and judicial approaches of the territories and provinces of Canada to the potential variation of wills in response to claims made by 'disappointed beneficiaries' (ie family members and dependents who have either been left nothing or an amount below their expectations). From her comprehensive review of the legal sources, she concludes that, 'we are proffered a window through which to see the social, cultural, economic and family values commonly held in that time and space' (211). More substantively, the chapter suggests that more recent cases have illustrated a shift towards greater emphasis on the autonomy of the testator, indicating a shift in those 'economic and family values' in Canadian society with less emphasis on familial obligation. There are many synergies between this chapter and Chapter 12, 'Children and Need and the Great Intergenerational Wealth Transfer'. In that chapter, Heather Conway and Sheena Grattan consider the equivalent legislative framework for claims against estates in England and Wales – the Inheritance (Provision for Family and Dependants) Act 1975, and the (relatively recent) Supreme Court judgment concerning that legislation in Ilott v The Blue Cross 2017 UKSC 17. This judgment (largely) struck the balance in favour of testamentary freedom, allowing the bulk of an estate of £486,000 to be inherited by animal charities with only £50,000 awarded to the deceased's estranged daughter, who was left nothing in her mother's will. The authors comment that, 'Ilott raises important public policy questions around the interplay between family obligation, inherited wealth and the welfare state' (244). The chapter is particularly interested in the interplay between public and private obligations, because Ms Ilott was in receipt of state benefits, and the decision meant that her mother's estate did not replace those state benefits as the primary means of supporting Ms Ilott and her family. In other words, the exercise of testamentary freedom was seen as largely legitimate (due to the estranged nature of the relationship between parent and child), meaning that the ongoing obligation rested with the state rather than within the family. These two chapters, and the specific legislative regimes that they consider, are illustrative and representative of questions and issues with which every jurisdiction must grapple – the relationship between the autonomy of the testator to determine the distribution of their property and the need for the legal regime to protect the legitimate interests of family members and other dependents in that property. Within the collection, similar issues are also considered in different contexts within different jurisdictions: in Chapter 11 on the role of notaries within the French inheritance system, and Chapter 15 on the evolution of, and debates concerning, inheritance taxation in Scandinavia. Thus, across its chapters, the collection makes clear that while individual legal systems may provide different answers, the questions that underpin legal regulation of inheritance in the twenty-first century are often fundamentally the same. To conclude, this is a thought-provoking collection of essays, which contains much of interest for readers from different disciplines, albeit that the main audience will likely be those who have a particular interest in the legal dimensions of inheritance and its regulation. The collection's breadth of coverage is both a strength and weakness; and in some key respects, Inheritance Matters raises more questions than it answers. The two themes, set out above, provide illustrative examples of such questions that are not fully answered by the collection. First, considering the relationship between inheritance and 'the family' undoubtedly raises the normative question – who should inherit? Second, and relatedly, exploring the relationship between the public and the private in the regulation of inheritance clearly raises the question – on what basis should any such legal entitlement to inherit rest? These are both complex questions, and answering them would involve a series of value judgements about the relative importance of: (i) specific familial relationships and statuses; (ii) the reality of the content and quality of these relationships during life; and (iii) the individual autonomy of the testator (even if exercised in a manner that may be seen as inappropriate by others). Moreover, answering these questions would require a much more detailed exposition of the desired role of the state in administering private property after death. Given this, it is unsurprising that a diverse edited collection does not, and cannot, fully answer such questions. However, this edited collection undoubtedly places inheritance at the centre of (legal) academic discussion, and through the questions raised, it illustrates why more academic consideration of inheritance would and will matter.