Nobody is legally an heir until the moment someone dies
In law you cannot be an heir while the person you expect to inherit from is still alive, because the exact list of who qualifies is fixed only at death. Until then, royal families speak of heirs apparent, who cannot be displaced, and heirs presumptive, who can be pushed aside by a closer claimant.
Inheritance covers far more than money: property, titles, debts, rights and duties can all pass on at death. Lawyers separate succession, the process of transfer, from the inheritance itself. Estates pass either under a valid will or, when there is none, through default intestacy rules, and a will that breaks local formalities, such as a handwritten one where those are not accepted, can be thrown out. Strictly, only those taking under intestacy are heirs; people named in a will are beneficiaries. Common law countries usually route estates through probate, while many civil law systems let heirs take ownership automatically.
Rules about who gets what have differed widely. Some societies let only sons inherit; others pass property down the female line, often to a sister's sons. Under the Law of Moses the firstborn son took a double share. When Zelophehad died without sons, his five daughters petitioned Moses and won the right to inherit, though a later ruling required heiresses to marry within their father's tribe so the land stayed put. The Quran named nine relatives as heirs, six of them women, while giving a son twice a daughter's portion.
Countries also disagree about disinheritance. Civil law traditions dating back to the Code of Hammurabi, around 1750 BC, fix children's shares by law. Louisiana, the only American state whose law descends from the Napoleonic Code, keeps this forced heirship, allowing adult children to be cut out only for narrow reasons a parent must prove. Elsewhere in the United States a parent can leave children nothing; the comedian Jerry Lewis explicitly excluded the six children from his first marriage.
Money on the move is vast. One estimate expects some 25 trillion dollars to pass between American generations by 2050. Yet fortunes are fragile: by one analysis, over two-thirds of wealthy families lose their wealth within two generations.
Source: Inheritance
