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

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

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 $u^a$ and spacelike matter inheritance vector, parallel to $x^a$. 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.

Inheritance for software reuse: The good, the bad, and the ugly

Inheritance is a powerful mechanism supported by object-oriented programming languages to facilitate modifications and extensions of reusable software components. This paper presents a taxonomy of the various purposes for which an inheritance mechanism can be used. While some uses of inheritance significantly enhance software reuse, some others are not as useful and in fact, may even be detrimental to reuse. The paper discusses several examples, and argues for a programming language design that is selective in its support for inheritance

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)

Gametic configuration and inheritance of SSR markers in tetraploid interspecific and intergeneric citrus somatic hybrids : S02P20

Citrus somatic hybridization has become an integral part of citrus improvement programs worldwide. More than 100 somatic hybrids have been created by Cirad. Intra and interspecific somatic hybrids will be used mostly for the triploid scion breeding. Intergeneric somatic hybrids can have a direct application as rootstocks or be used as parents for sexual 'tetrazyg' breeding. To optimize the design of such breeding schemes, it is essential to have knowledge of the inheritance mode in such allotetraploid hybrids. The aim of the present study was to investigate the inheritance (disomic, tetrasomic or intermediate) in a citrus interspecific hybrid (Citrus reticulata x Citrus limon) and an intergeneric somatic hybrid (C. reticulata x Poncirus trifoliata). Two triploid populations were generated using the somatic hybrids as pollinators in crosses with the diploid 'Chandler' pummelo. The triploid progenies were genotyped with SSRs to infer the allelic constitution of the somatic hybrid gametes. A likelihood-based approach was used to estimate for each locus the proportion of disomic versus tetrasomic segregations. For the two somatic hybrids, intermediate inheritance was observed with a major tendency for tetrasomic segregation in the interspecific hybrid, but a tendency for disomic inheritance in the intergeneric hybrid. The implications of the observed inheritance mode for citrus breeding are discussed with special focus on heterozygosity restitution. (Texte intégral

The Essence of Inheritance

Programming languages serve a dual purpose: to communicate programs to computers, and to communicate programs to humans. Indeed, it is this dual purpose that makes programming language design a constrained and challenging problem. Inheritance is an essential aspect of that second purpose: it is a tool to improve communication. Humans understand new concepts most readily by first looking at a number of concrete examples, and later abstracting over those examples. The essence of inheritance is that it mirrors this process: it provides a formal mechanism for moving from the concrete to the abstract.Comment: This paper was submitted for inclusion in a Festschrift entitled "A list of successes that can change the world", to be published by Springe

An empirical study of evolution of inheritance in Java OSS

Previous studies of Object-Oriented (OO) software have reported avoidance of the inheritance mechanism and cast doubt on the wisdom of ‘deep’ inheritance levels. From an evolutionary perspective, the picture is unclear - we still know relatively little about how, over time, changes tend to be applied by developers. Our conjecture is that an inheritance hierarchy will tend to grow ‘breadth-wise’ rather than ‘depth-wise’. This claim is made on the basis that developers will avoid extending depth in favour of breadth because of the inherent complexity of having to understand the functionality of superclasses. Thus the goal of our study is to investigate this empirically. We conduct an empirical study of seven Java Open-Source Systems (OSSs) over a series of releases to observe the nature and location of changes within the inheritance hierarchies. Results show a strong tendency for classes to be added at levels one and two of the hierarchy (rather than anywhere else). Over 96% of classes added over the course of the versions of all systems were at level 1 or level 2. The results suggest that changes cluster in the shallow levels of a hierarchy; this is relevant for developers since it indicates where remedial activities such as refactoring should be focused