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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.