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Family, Law, and Inheritance in America: A Social and Legal History of Nineteenth-Century Kentucky (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society)

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Description

Yvonne Pitts explores inheritance practices by that specialize in nineteenth-century testamentary capacity trials in Kentucky during which disinherited members of the family challenged relatives’ wills. These disappointed heirs claimed that their departed relative lacked the capacity required to write a valid will. These inheritance disputes crisscrossed plenty of legal and cultural terrains, including peculiar 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 safe free will even as concurrently 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 once a term laden with legal meaning and competing communal values about circle of relatives, race relations, and rationality. These concepts evolved as Kentucky’s legal culture mutated as the state transitioned from a conflicted border state with slaves to a developing free-labor, industrializing economy.

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