Document Type

Honors Project

Abstract

Probate is a legal process to distribute a deceased person’s assets involving a personal representative who administers the estate on behalf of the deceased. It is uniquely situated in the intersection of a procedurally exhaustive process and the deeply emotional experience of losing a loved one, where legal procedures are imposed on relational contexts. I draw on in-depth interviews with personal representatives from four counties in Minnesota to expose the dissimilar way personal representatives understand the meaning of inheritance money, which in turn influenced how they understood and navigated the probate process. The lack of a clear pattern found in the meaning of inheritance money in the probate process presents a puzzle: Inheritance is among the most commonplace phenomena, yet is understood and experienced so differently. I argue that it is these ambiguous understandings that, rather than obscure social meanings of inheritance, legitimate inheritance processes as necessary for defining complex and contextual social relationships via a fluid meaning of inheritance money. I will use a combination of theoretical frameworks to fill gaps in current theories on inheritance. I distinguish between relational and interactional frameworks to argue that the social differentiation of money and specifically earmarking occur beyond a purely relational level. Specifically, I situate earmarking in the framework of legal consciousness and the interactional, fluid nature of legality to illustrate that inheritance’s social and legal meanings draw from each other to culminate in a dominating social meaning of inheritance as a legitimate and necessary procedure, despite its inconveniences, to accommodate the non-linear nature of complex social relationships and the way that inheritance money helps to define these relationships.

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