Sexuality and Succession Law: Beyond Formal Equality

This article endeavours to open up a dialogue between succession law and the field of gender, sexuality and the law. It presents a detailed analysis of five cases concerning inheritance disputes relating to lesbians or gay men. The sexuality of the parties in the cases is ‘doctrinally irrelevant’ but the analysis demonstrates the significance of sexuality in the resolution of the legal disputes. In doing so it identifies how legal discourse remains a critical site for the production of societal norms and in particular how lesbian and gay perspectives reveal the gendered assumptions underlying a number of key succession law doctrines. It emphasises the importance of taking difference seriously and the limits to formal legal equality.