Inheritance and Continuity : Because We Cannot Stop for Death

This book offers a theoretical framework for understanding inheritance law across legal systems. It conceptualizes inheritance as a form of continuity and provides scholars, students, and comparative lawyers with a holistic theory that clarifies doctrinal debates and illuminates the theoretical and normative role of property transfers after death.

Why does inheritance law persist in modern legal systems, and what justifies the transmission of property beyond death? This book develops a holistic theory of inheritance grounded in the concept of continuity. It moves beyond traditional accounts centered on testamentary freedom or family protection and argues that inheritance law responds to a fundamental problem created by mortality: the disruption of ownership at death. The book offers a theory that explains both testamentary freedom regimes and family-protection systems as alternative forms of continuity. It therefore enables a comparative analysis of different systems. It also advances a normative conception of continuity as a collaboration between the deceased giver and surviving recipients and, based on this conception, offers concrete criteria for evaluating legal doctrines across jurisdictions. Bringing mortality to the center of property theory, this work provides a coherent, comparative, and normatively rich account of inheritance law for scholars, students, and legal theorists.