Awards

• Winner of American Society for Legal History Cromwell Book Prize 2014
• Winner of American Society for Legal History Cromwell Book Prize 2014.
• Winner of Cromwell Book Prize, American Society for Legal History 2014

Overview

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.

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9781107035508

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Reviews

In the skillful hands of Yvonne Pitts, the law of inheritance becomes a lens through which to consider broader discussions over the fraught relationships among individuals, their families, their communities, and the shape of American society more generally in the nineteenth century. Highly readable and deeply researched, the book highlights the contingencies of social change in this period as people grappled with the implications of emancipation, economic change, and the changing role of women. It also recasts our understanding of people's relationship to the law, showing how the emotions that drove family conflicts had as much to do in defining the law as the law did in resolving their all-too-human disputes. - Laura F. Edwards, Duke University Family, Law, and Inheritance in America explores one of the most significant - yet shockingly understudied - questions in U.S. history: How free were Americans to determine the disposition of their property after they themselves ceased to exist? By thoroughly examining a century of trials in which testamentary capacity was at stake, Pitts offers keen insights into family structure, race relations, medical expertise, gendered power, and legal doctrine as those factors interacted in different ways over time. This is an outstanding study: the social history of law at its best. - James Mohr, University of Oregon

Author Information

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.

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