ABSTRACT
Wealth law is full of ghosts, ghosts everywhere all at once. As a form of both preservation and disruption, a form of continuance as well as a form of interruption, ghosts are reminders of the past in its multiple forms. But they are also figures that prompt consideration of the present as well as speculation about the future. Jacques Derrida, who suggested the idea of ‘hauntology’, posited haunting and the ghostly as being ‘time out of joint’, a reference to Hamlet’s confused cry upon seeing his father’s ghost. Like ghosts, inheritance and wealth transfer laws represent ruptures in time, enabling the destabilizing presence of the past alongside the various possibilities for the present and future. It should come then as no surprise then that ghosts of many shades and stories populate the lawscape of inheritance. There are images of ghosts who return to monitor the afterlives of their wealth, full of fear and skepticism about how relatives will manage their legacies. These are the ghosts of decedents with property to control, ghosts concerned about legacies and the perpetuation of personal and family legacies. These ghosts are kindred to the ghosts, cadavers, and hoarders invoked by Karl Marx, tied to specters of asset creation and asset protection, buoyed by the enchantment of money and the magic of purchasing power. Accompanying and abetting these individual ghosts, there are more diffuse and ethereal ghosts, the ghosts of history and empire, the ghosts of dynastic rule and past property systems. This short Article represents a brief and not at all comprehensive attempt to analyze the various kinds of ghosts that haunt property and wealth transfer law and what messages they hold, both specifically for the legal regulation of inheritance law and, more broadly for the political economy of inheritance.
Tait, Allison Anna, The Haunting of Wealth Law (June 12, 2024), ACTEC Law Journal 49 (2023).
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