Family, Law, and Inheritance in America

A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky

Yvonne Pitts (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

213 Seiten

2013
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-107-03550-8 (ISBN)

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

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.

Yvonne Pitts is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Purdue University. She received a Filson Fellowship at the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, and has been a fellow at J. Willard Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Dr Pitts has been published in The Journal of Women's History.

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.

Erscheint lt. Verlag	20.5.2013
Reihe/Serie	Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society
Zusatzinfo	11 Tables, unspecified; 1 Maps; 1 Halftones, unspecified; 1 Line drawings, unspecified
Verlagsort	Cambridge
Sprache	englisch
Maße	157 x 235 mm
Gewicht	510 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Sozialgeschichte
	Recht / Steuern ► EU / Internationales Recht
ISBN-10	1-107-03550-3 / 1107035503
ISBN-13	978-1-107-03550-8 / 9781107035508
Zustand	Neuware