I acknowledge and fondly remember my grandfathers, Maurice Elmer Drake and Archibald Vance Houston, who provided me with the inspiration and foundation necessary to share their story. I would like to humbly express my appreciation to the men of the 558th AAA AW BN and U.S.S. Culebra Island ARG7 for telling their stories. I stand in awe of the countless World War II veterans I have interviewed over the years. Lastly, thank you to the millions of World War II veterans who served our country during 1939-1945. Our current freedom was paid for in blood it is the responsibility of my generation and those that follow to never forget the cost of freedom and to protect it at all costs.

How to regulate the transfer of wealth from one generation to the next has been hotly debated among politicians, legal scholars, sociologists, economists, and philosophers for centuries. Bequeathing wealth is a vital ingredient of family solidarity. But does the reproduction of social inequality through inheritance square with the principle of equal opportunity? Does democracy suffer when family wealth becomes political power? The first in-depth, comparative study of the development of inheritance law in the United States, France, and Germany, Inherited Wealth investigates longstanding political and intellectual debates over inheritance laws and explains why these laws still differ so greatly among these countries. Using a sociological perspective, Jens Beckert sheds light on the four most controversial issues in inheritance law during the past two centuries: the freedom to dispose of one's property as one wishes, the rights of family members to the wealth bequeathed, the dissolution of entails (which restrict inheritance to specific classes of heirs), and estate taxation. Beckert shows that while the United States, France, and Germany have all long defended inheritance rights based on the notion of individual property rights, they have justified limitations on inheritance rights in profoundly different ways, reflecting culturally specific ways of understanding the problems of inherited wealth.

This book discusses the law of inheritance and administration of deceased estates in Malawi. Its coverage includes basic concepts underlying inheritance; history of law of inheritance in Malawi; Will-making and testate inheritance; intestate inheritance; pension and inheritance of pension benefits and life insurance policies; other forms of inheritance like promissory estoppel, donationes mortis causa, rule in Strong v Bird and mutual Wills; estate duty; grants and personal representatives; and administration of deceased estates. Key statutes discussed include Constitution of Malawi, Deceased Estates (Wills, Inheritance and Protection) Act, Pensions Act, Estate Duty Act and Trustees Act. The book is designed as a reference for judicial officers, legal practitioners, public officers and administrators of deceased estates, law students, policy and legislative makers, pension fund managers, civil society activists (particularly on children and women’s rights) and interested academics.

Two sociologists and a lawyer examine here the attitudes of both survivors and attorney on various problems surrounding inheritance—from will-making through estate settlement. Within a legal frame of reference, this book is a study of what happens within a family at death—and why. The authors use the "inheritance unit" as the basis for looking at the functions of inheritance in intergenerational family continuity and the general patterns of family relationship.

The debate on inheritance and inheritance taxation has always been linked with the " efficiency versus equity issue". Some consider inheritance taxes as highly appropriate means to bring forth more economic equality, especially equality in starting conditions. Others openly doubt the effectiveness of inheritance taxes in this domain, and point out that the negative effects may outweigh the positive. Some go as far as to say that high inheritance taxes threaten fundamental ethical values and should therefore be abolished. In this book both economists and philosophers try to disentangle these and related theoretical issues. It gives an overview of what economists and philosophers have to say on the matter, and confronts and discusses two radically opposed reform proposals.

The core of the book consists of a selection of papers presented at an international workshop where researchers from a variety of fields and countries discussed the connections between inherited wealth, justice and equality. The volume is complemented by a few other papers commissioned by the editors. The contributions cover historical, political, philosophical, sociological and economic aspects.

Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy provides a theoretically rich and accessible account of Derrida's political philosophy. Demonstrating the key role inheritance plays in Derrida's thinking, Samir Haddad develops a general theory of inheritance and shows how it is essential to democratic action. He transforms Derrida's well-known idea of "democracy to come" into active engagement with democratic traditions. Haddad focuses on issues such as hospitality, justice, normativity, violence, friendship, birth, and the nature of democracy as he reads these deeply political writings.

We regard genocidal violence as worse than other sorts of violence—perhaps the worst there is. But what does this say about what we value about the genos on which nations are said to be founded? This is an urgent question for democracies. We value the mode of being in time that anchors us in the past and in the future, that is, among those who have been and those who might yet be. If the genos is a group constituted by this generational time, the demos was invented as the anti-genos, with no criterion of inheritance and instead only occurring according to the interruption of revolutionary time. Insofar as the demos persists, we experience it as a sort of genos, for example, the democratic nation state. As a result, democracies are caught is a bind, disavowing genos-thinking while cherishing the temporal forms of genos-life; they abhor genocidal violence but perpetuate and disguise it. This is the genocide paradox. O’Byrne traces the problem through our commitment to existential categories from Aristotle to the life taxonomies of Linneaus and Darwin, through anthropologies of kinship that tether us to the social world, the shortfalls of ethical theory, into the history of democratic theory and the defensive tactics used by real existing democracies when it came to defining genocide for the U.N. Genocide Convention. She argues that, although models of democracy all make room for contestation, they fail to grasp its generational structure or acknowledge the generational content of our lives. They cultivate ignorance of the contingency and precarity of the relations that create and sustain us. The danger of doing so is immense. It leaves us unprepared for confronting democracy’s deficits and its struggle to entertain multiple temporalities. In addition, it leaves us unprepared for understanding the relation between demos and violence, and the ability of good enough citizens to tolerate the slow-burning destruction of marginalized peoples. What will it take to envision an anti-genocidal democracy?

This book makes a compelling case for placing the social and legal practices of inheritance centre stage to make sense of fundamental questions of our time. Drawing on historical, literary, sociological, and legal analysis, this rich collection of original, interdisciplinary and international contributions demonstrates how inheritance is and has always been about far more than the set of legal processes for the distribution of wealth and property upon death. The contributions range from exploring the intractable tensions underlying family disputes and the legal and political debates about taxation, to revisiting literary plots in the past and presenting a contemporary artistic challenge of heirship. With an introduction that presents a critical mapping of the field of inheritance studies, this collection reveals the complexity of ideas about 'passing on', 'legacies', and 'heirlooms'; troubles some of the enduring consequences of 'charitable bequests', 'family money', and 'estate planning; and, deepens our understanding of the intimate and political practices of inheritance.