## Facts

- Sherman Gordon, an Illinois resident, died intestate.
- Illinois Probate Act § 12 permitted legitimate children to inherit from both parents by intestacy, but permitted nonmarital children to inherit only from their mothers.
- Deta Trimble was Gordon’s acknowledged nonmarital daughter.
- Before Gordon’s death, a state court entered a paternity judgment finding Gordon to be Trimble’s father and ordering child support.
- After Gordon’s death, Trimble sought to inherit from his intestate estate.
- The Illinois probate court denied the claim solely because Trimble was nonmarital and § 12 barred inheritance from the father.

## Issues

1. Whether Illinois Probate Act § 12 violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by allowing nonmarital children to inherit by intestacy from their mothers but not from their fathers.
2. Whether the State’s interests in encouraging legitimate family relationships, preventing fraud, and facilitating estate administration justify a categorical denial of paternal intestate inheritance to nonmarital children, including when paternity has been judicially established.
3. Whether the father’s ability to provide for a nonmarital child by will cures any equal protection defect in the intestacy statute.

## Decision

- The Supreme Court reversed, holding (5–4) that § 12 violated the Equal Protection Clause.
- The Court applied a meaningful rational-basis review to classifications based on illegitimacy, requiring a rational relationship to legitimate state purposes and a classification that is “carefully tuned” to those purposes.
- The Court rejected “promoting legitimate family life” as a justification insofar as it operated by penalizing children for their parents’ nonmarital relationship.
- The Court accepted that difficulties of proving paternity and risks of spurious claims can be legitimate concerns, but held that a total bar to paternal inheritance was overinclusive because it excluded children even when paternity was reliably established.
- The Court held that testamentary freedom (the father could have made a will) does not save discriminatory default rules of intestate succession.
- The case was remanded for further proceedings consistent with the holding.

## Legal Principles

- Classifications based on illegitimacy are not subject to strict scrutiny, but they must bear a rational relationship to legitimate state objectives under a form of rational-basis review that has real force.
- A State may not attempt to influence adult conduct regarding marriage or childbirth by imposing legal disabilities on children born outside marriage.
- Administrative convenience and fraud prevention may justify reasonable evidentiary or procedural requirements for establishing paternity in intestacy, but not a categorical disinheritance that applies even where paternity is adjudicated.
- The availability of making a will does not excuse unequal treatment embedded in intestacy statutes.

## Conclusion

Illinois’s rule that categorically barred nonmarital children from inheriting from a father who died intestate violated equal protection because it was not sufficiently related to legitimate state interests, particularly where paternity had already been established through judicial proceedings.


Trimble v. Gordon, 430 U.S. 762 (1977)