Yeah, that’s on John for not being a better judge of character.
Isn’t there something called “accord and satisfaction”?
There is, but I cannot possibly imagine what it has to do in this context.
John only agreed to give the collection to Junior based on Junior saying he would fulfill certain conditions. Junior then failed to fulfill those conditions.
How is this any different from failing to fulfill the terms of any other contract besides the fact that John is dead?
Well, isn’t that what happens if the heirs and the executor agree?
A will is not a contract. Further, the law disfavors “dead hand” control of assets and restraints on alienation. Take a piece of land, for instance. I have a one acre lakefront parcel that I inherited from my father, and he from his. If we fast forward ten thousand years, there will be many, many people who possess this property and will want to make decisions on it based upon their own needs and wants. Why should I, UltraVires, who possesses it for the meager span of my life, get to control this property well after my death? It makes absolutely no sense. All I am doing is burdening my heirs and assigns with my wishes that may becoming meaningless after intervening events.
Even if it was the contract, who is the aggrieved party? John, right? Who now speaks for John? Nobody really. The only person who might be able to speak is someone who didn’t get something given to him in John’s will.
There are a million wrinkles that can flow from this. John could bequeath the stamp collection to a trust and appoint a trustee who has a duty to maintain it. However, the trust would have to have a beneficiary of the properly maintained stamp collection. If the beneficiary and the trustee agree to sell it, then nobody is harmed, and nobody has standing to bring a lawsuit.
John could also give a conditional gift while he his alive. Say, give the stamp collection to Junior only if he agrees not to sell it. If he tries to sell it, it reverts to John. Well, John now dies. Junior tries to sell it, so under the contract it reverts to John, who is now dead, so it passes to Junior who can sell it.
Finally, how do we really know John’s wishes. Maybe Junior has a kid on the way and/or wants to start a small business. For all we know John would have said, “Well, I wanted to keep the stamp collection intact, but my family’s future income is far more important. It is only a fucking stamp collection after all.” We do not and should not keep things tied up based upon a temporary wish of a person who is now deceased.
I see where you are trying to go, but no. Accord and satisfaction is a UCC contract provision which deals with agreements between parties.
The objection in the OP, and it is a valid one in a moral or ethical sense, is that the deceased is being screwed out of his power to distribute his assets. Accord and satisfaction doesn’t address that.
Is there something in the will that actually stipulates this and directs where the collection should go if Junior is unwilling to fufill the conditions? Or John have this conversation with Junior months or years before his death and the will just says “I leave my stamp collection to Junior” ? If it was the latter, I don’t think the failure to fulfill the conditions that don’t appear in the will are going to make a difference. Anything could have happened between John’s conversation with Bob and the writing of John’s will. If it was the former, John might not be able to do it without setting up some sort of trust and possibly not even then. My mother (she who wants to control things from beyond the grave) wanted to leave her house to my sister with three conditions:
- My sister would have to pay her siblings some amount of money for “their share” of the house
- My sister would have to allow any of my mother’s grandchildren who wanted to live in the two apartments my sister didn’t occupy.
- The house could never be sold - not by my sister and not by her heirs
Multiple lawyers said no, no and no. She could get the effect of the first , but she it would have to be through a sale during my mother’s lifetime.She could get the effect of the third for some period of time (but not forever) by leaving the house to a trust and making my sister the first beneficiary and then choosing who would be the beneficiaries after my sister’s death but eventually someone would be permitted to sell the house. But I don’t think she could even get the effect of the second condition - at least not with eight grandchildren. Maybe she could have if she wanted to specify one or two - I’m not sure if that one was a legal problem or a practical problem.
I am a lawyer that dabbles in estate planning. #1 and #2 are doable, but as you said, there might be a practicable problem depending on exactly how your mother wanted to handle it. There are ways to work that out.
#3 is right out if she meant that your sister’s remote heirs, as in until the day the sun goes supernova, may never sell the property. She could control it through her grandchildren’s lives, but as I said in my prior post, she shouldn’t do that. My mind changes on things more than I change underwear. Why saddle your grandchildren with a house when they might be living on a moon colony?
How is Bob going to prove to a court that John would have left the collection to him, had John known that Junior intended to break it up? Bob can’t just expect everyone to take his word for it that John told him that. He would need for John to have indicated that intention in writing, presumably in some kind of certified document that would persist after John’s death …
That’s a key difference, though.
The actual contract here was not leaving the stamps to Junior, in return for Junior keeping the collection intact. It was to make a will leaving the stamps to Junior, in return for Junior undertaking to keep the collection intact. And that contract was fully performed when Junior gave, and did not revoke, the required undertaking, and John made, and did not revoke, the will.
Had Junior revoked his undertaking at any time while John was alive, John could have revoked his will, but that didn’t happen. Once John died, he cannot revoke his will and Junior can revoke (or simply ignore) his undertaking without sanction. John, obviously, cannot take steps to sanction him, and nobody else has standing to. Bill in particular has no standing to because he’s not mentioned in the will. The contract between John and Junior has been fully performed.
John’s lawyer should have advised him that Junior’s undertaking was unenforceable after John’s death - the contract, in other words, would not endure after John’s death. If John did not trust Junior to honour his undertaking he, John, needed to make some other arrangements in his will - e.g. establishing a trust to care for the stamp collection and keep it together during Junior’s life, perhaps with power to sell the stamp collection as a whole to a philatelic museum, and pay the proceeds to Junior.
The bottom line is that John cannot, by his will, absolutely ensure that the stamp collection will remain together indefinitely. Public policy leans strongly against the wishes of long-dead people operating restrict dealing with or use of property in accordance with the wishes and interest of living owners. The most that John can do is to leave the stamp collection to the person he thinks most likely to keep it together.
By “potential heirs” you mean people who might have been named in the will if the will had been written differently, but as matters stand are not named? And who would not be the intestate successors if there had been no will at all?
No, they have no standing.
If all of the beneficiaries of the estate are of full age and of sound mind and they unanimously agree that instead of doing X with the estate, as the will directs, the executor should do Y, then yes, they can bring that about. And they don’t consent to the executor doing Y; they direct him to do it. The instrument by which this is done is called something like a Deed of Variation, depending on usage in the particular jurisdiction where this happens. If they only want to deal like this with part of the estate - a particular asset, say - then you only need the involvement of all of the beneficiaries who have some claim on or interest in that part.
Take detailed legal and tax advice before proceeding. In some jurisdications the tax consquences will be those that would have ensued had the testator made a will directing that Y be done. In others, the tax consequences will be those that would have ensued had the estate been distributed as the will directed, and the beneficiaries had then transferred on the assets received in a separate series of transactions to produce outcome Y.
What is this Deed of Variation of which you speak? Honestly, I’ve never heard of it. A quick google search shows it to be a UK thing. We whipped you all twice to get away from that kind of stuff. 
I’ve come across it in Ireland and in Australia. But it depends on fairly fundamental common law principles, so I’d be surprised if something similar (if perhaps differently-named) wasn’t found in other common law jurisdictions.
Basically, an estate in administration is a trust, with the executor/administrator being the trustee, the legatees/heirs being the beneficiaries, and the assets of the estate being the trust property. Since the legatees/heirs are between them entitled to the entire beneficial interest in the net estate (after payments of debts, funeral expenses, and other charges on the assets of the estate) they can, together, do what any set of beneficiaries who are absolutely entitled as against the trustee can do. They can put an end to the trust, and they can carve up the trust assets between them however they like. Or they can vary the trust in any way that they want, though this last course does require the executor to be willing to act in the administration of the estate as so varied.
In the jurisdictions mentioned, the instrument by which they typically do this is a deed, and it’s conventionally called a deed of arrangement, but on both these points your mileage may vary.
The key point is that, between them, they have to be entitled to the entire beneficial interest in the assets they want to deal with, and they have to act unanimously. Even one holdout, or one person with an interest who is, e.g., not of full age, and the whole thing falls over.
Wow!
Presumably your actions include a complaint to the state bar association about the lawyer? In this case I would have put Stupid before Greed if the fantasy authors in any way imagined that ALL the heirs would agree, especially those who stood to lose money.
If any of the ones being deprived were underage, I imagine a whole new level of legal wrangling. Plus, I hope the estate itself did not pay for a lawyer in order to advise the executor on how to break the will to the detriment of some of the heirs he owed a fiduciary duty to.
Nothing brings out the childish family feuds like a good inheritance fight.
(My favorite story which I heard was about the second husband who had to have the late wife’s adult children arrested for theft when they tried to take much of the stuff from the house claiming it was “theirs” when their mother died.)
It doesn’t sound as though the lawyer was especially smart, to be honest.
If I was minded to do what the executor did, the first thing I would do would be not retain a lawyer, since he would tell me that I couldn’t do it. After I had done it - i.e. distributed the assets in the way that I thought best by consulting my own heart rather than the provisions of the will - I’d take advice from a lawyer about how to sort it all out. And the advice might well be “you need to disclose what you have done to all the beneficiaries, and get them to consent to it. This isn’t very likely to work, but it’s the only think that could work”.
Oh, yes indeed! Edit: and the estate is going to pay for the lawyers, unless the courts decide otherwise. I fought long and hard against that one, but ultimately I had to choose between my mother, who just wants to see this end, and what I think is right. I chose Mom over grandpa + money. There’s still a few cards in play, though!
Yes. This is ultimately going to be one of my arguments: they are planning to count the value of the household goods and furnishings as $0, since at this point there’s no valid way of accounting for them. I’m going to refuse to sign the release to distribute the estate, because if a lawyer was involved within three weeks of the death, there damn well should be an accurate inventory!
In my state, this would lead to a pretty big problem with the Commissioner of Accounts (person appointed by the Court to supervise estates). They would probably have to respond to a lawsuit or two.