464,591 research outputs found
Inheritance Forgery
Many venerable norms in inheritance law were designed to prevent forgery. Most prominently, since 1837, the Wills Act has required testators to express their last wishes in a signed and witnessed writing. Likewise, the court-supervised probate process helped ensure that a donative instrument was genuine and that assets passed to their rightful owners. But in the mid-twentieth century, concern about forgery waned. Based in part on the perception that counterfeit estate plans are rare, several states relaxed the Wills Act and authorized new formalities for notarized and even digital wills. In addition, lawmakers encouraged owners to bypass probate altogether by transmitting wealth through devices such as life insurance and transfer-on-death deeds.
This Article offers a fresh look at inheritance-related forgery. Cutting against the conventional wisdom, it discovers that counterfeit donative instruments are a serious problem. Using reported cases, empirical research, grand jury investigations, and media stories, it reveals that courts routinely adjudicate credible claims that wills, deeds, and life insurance beneficiary designations are illegitimate. The Article then argues that the persistence of inheritance-related forgeries casts doubt on the wisdom of some recent innovations, including statutes that permit notarized and electronic wills. The Article also challenges well-established inheritance law norms, including the litigation presumptions in will-forgery contests, the widespread practice of rubber-stamping deeds, and the delegation of responsibility for authenticating a nonprobate transfer to private companies. Finally, the Article outlines reforms to modernize succession while remaining sensitive to the risks of forgery
An empirical study evaluating depth of inheritance on the maintainability of object-oriented software
This empirical research was undertaken as part of a multi-method programme of research to investigate unsupported claims made of object-oriented technology. A series of subject-based laboratory experiments, including an internal replication, tested the effect of inheritance depth on the maintainability of object-oriented software. Subjects were timed performing identical maintenance tasks on object-oriented software with a hierarchy of three levels of inheritance depth and equivalent object-based software with no inheritance. This was then replicated with more experienced subjects. In a second experiment of similar design, subjects were timed performing identical maintenance tasks on object-oriented software with a hierarchy of five levels of inheritance depth and the equivalent object-based software. The collected data showed that subjects maintaining object-oriented software with three levels of inheritance depth performed the maintenance tasks significantly quicker than those maintaining equivalent object-based software with no inheritance. In contrast, subjects maintaining the object-oriented software with five levels of inheritance depth took longer, on average, than the subjects maintaining the equivalent object-based software (although statistical significance was not obtained). Subjects' source code solutions and debriefing questionnaires provided some evidence suggesting subjects began to experience diffculties with the deeper inheritance hierarchy. It is not at all obvious that object-oriented software is going to be more maintainable in the long run. These findings are sufficiently important that attempts to verify the results should be made by independent researchers
Timelike and Spacelike Matter Inheritance Vectors in Specific Forms of Energy-Momentum Tensor
This paper is devoted to the investigation of the consequences of timelike
and spacelike matter inheritance vectors in specific forms of energy-momentum
tensor, i.e., for string cosmology (string cloud and string fluid) and perfect
fluid. Necessary and sufficient conditions are developed for a spacetime with
string cosmology and perfect fluid to admit a timelike matter inheritance
vector, parallel to and spacelike matter inheritance vector, parallel to
. We compare the outcome with the conditions of conformal Killing vectors.
This comparison provides us the conditions for the existence of matter
inheritance vector when it is also a conformal Killing vector. Finally, we
discuss these results for the existence of matter inheritance vector in the
special cases of the above mentioned spacetimes.Comment: 27 pages, accepted for publication in Int. J. of Mod. Phys.
Multi-Dimensional Inheritance
In this paper, we present an alternative approach to multiple inheritance for
typed feature structures. In our approach, a feature structure can be
associated with several types coming from different hierarchies (dimensions).
In case of multiple inheritance, a type has supertypes from different
hierarchies. We contrast this approach with approaches based on a single type
hierarchy where a feature structure has only one unique most general type, and
multiple inheritance involves computation of greatest lower bounds in the
hierarchy. The proposed approach supports current linguistic analyses in
constraint-based formalisms like HPSG, inheritance in the lexicon, and
knowledge representation for NLP systems. Finally, we show that
multi-dimensional inheritance hierarchies can be compiled into a Prolog term
representation, which allows to compute the conjunction of two types
efficiently by Prolog term unification.Comment: 9 pages, styles: a4,figfont,eepic,eps
Recommended from our members
Mother nature's tolerant ways: why non-genetic inheritance has nothing to do with evolution
Recently a number of theorists have suggested that evolution can use non-genetic or environmental inheritance to pass on adaptations (e.g. Mameli, 2004). Furthermore, it has been suggested that nongenetic, or environmental factors, can play a central role in the process of evolution that is not captured by the neo-Darwinian view which places natural selection centre-stage (e.g. Odling-Smee, Laland & Feldman, 2003). In this paper we present and clarify neo-Darwinian theory and then take issue with the notions of contemporary gene-centred selection and inheritance that non-genetic inheritance theorists have used. We claim that they have misunderstood the distinction and relationship between intrinsic and extrinsic inheritance and we clarify this with a number of examples from the behavioural and biological sciences. According to this analysis there is no such thing as biologically independent nongenetic inheritance, all extrinsic inheritance is a consequence of traits and dispositions that are intrinsic to an organism and intrinsic design can only be explained through neo-Darwinism. We point to the implications this view has for current conceptions of cultural evolution
Gifts and inheritances in Ireland. ESRI WP579, December 2017
Information on the frequency, value and composition of household wealth
transfers has been fairly limited in Ireland and this paper aims to fill this gap by drawing
on the detailed data now available on the pattern of gifts and inheritances from the
2013 Household Finance and Consumption Survey. We find that a considerably larger
number of older and wealthier households report having received a gift or inheritance
compared to their younger, less wealthy counterparts. The household main residence
and businesses/farms are identified as the most important asset type in wealth
transfers. Overall slightly over 13% of home-owning households were gifted or
inherited their household main residence. We also show some association between
inheritance and position in the wealth distribution, controlling for other factors. We
find that that having received an inheritance or gift moves a household up the wealth
distribution by 15.4 percentiles on average relative to households of the same income
level that did not receive an inheritance. This effect is particularly large when the
inheritance takes the form of a business or a property (not the main residence)
- …