Unnatural Wills: Inheritance Disputes and Inequality

Within the conceptual frame of relational economic sociology, inheritance disputes are a canonical form of relational mismatch. But the social patterning of relational mismatches, and their various ties to inequality, remain murky. In this paper, I examine all known inheritance disputes in Dallas from 1895-1945 within their social context to generate hypotheses about the relationship between inequality and mismatches more broadly. Inheritance disputes were usually resolved by increasing the spread of fortunes; in this sense, they moderated wealth inequality between individuals. But not everyone was equally able to make their preferred estate distribution a reality. Using a series of case studies, I argue that dispute resolutions tended to reify normative family structures and naturalize sharp, moralized distinctions between fuzzy social categories. The legal resolutions to this class of relational mismatches may marginally mitigate individual-level wealth inequality and simultaneously produce categorical inequalities by race, class, gender, sexuality, and family structure. I conclude with a set of hypotheses and questions for future studies.