Opinion ID: 1724018
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: devisees of a homestead may be entitled to the homestead provision's protections against creditors

Text: The first question we must resolve is whether the protection against creditors found in the homestead provision can be transferred, with a will, to a devisee. This Court has never addressed whether the term heirs in the homestead provision includes devisees. Under the common law, an heir was a person designated to inherit in the event of intestacy at the death of the decedent. Now, however, the term is frequently used in a popular sense to designate a successor to property either by will or by law. Black's Law Dictionary 724 (6th ed. 1990)(Word `heirs' is no longer limited to designated character of estate as at common law.) If we define the term heirs in the homestead provision by its strict common-law definition, the very act of devising the homestead would abolish the homestead protections against creditors. We refuse to construe the homestead provision in such a narrow way. In reaching this conclusion, we are persuaded by the reasoning of the Third District Court of Appeal, sitting en banc, in Bartelt v. Bartelt, 579 So.2d 282 (Fla. 3d DCA 1991). That court addressed the situation in which the decedent, who died without a surviving spouse but with two surviving adult children, a son and a daughter, devised his homestead only to his son. There, the district court held that the homestead exemption passed to the devisee through the will even though the omitted child would have been entitled to an equal share of the homestead had the decedent died intestate. In so holding, the Bartelt court stated: When the decedent's homestead is devised to his sona member of the class of persons who are the decedent's heirsthe constitutional exemption from forced sale by the decedent's creditors found in Article X, Section 4(b) of the Florida Constitution, inures to that son. The test is not how title was devolved, but rather to whom it passed.... The personal representative argues that, although heirs may avail themselves of the constitutional protection from creditors, devisees may not. Section 731.201(18), Florida Statutes (1989), defines heirs or heirs at law as those persons... who are entitled under the statutes of intestate succession to the property of a decedent. Devisees are defined in section 731.201(9) as persons designated in a will to receive a devise. According to the personal representative, a devisee cannot be an heir because a devisee takes by will and an heir takes only where there is no will. We disagree. Heirs, as defined in section 731.201(18), are simply those persons entitled to receive property under the laws of intestacy; the decedent's son, as his lineal descendant, is a member of that class. § 732.103(1), Fla. Stat. (1989). The class designated as heirs does not exclude those who, but for the decedent's foresight in executing a will, would have taken by the laws of intestate succession.... Article X, section 4 of the Florida Constitution defines the class of persons to whom the decedent's exemption from forced sale of homestead property inures; it does not mandate the technique by which the qualified person must receive title. Id. at 283-84. An academic commentator on this subject writes approvingly of the result reached by that district court: This author supports the Bartelt decision. The constitutional exemption from forced sale by creditors, as found in article X, § 4(b) of the Florida Constitution, inures to the surviving spouse or heirs of the owner. Bartelt includes within the term heirs devisees who but for the will would have been heirs. It properly takes a broad gauged approach to the constitutional terminology. It places substance over form. The persons involved as takers are the same whether there is a will or there is not a will. The court points out that without such a determination, with respect to homestead, Florida residents would be discouraged from making wills and would be encouraged to let the property in issue pass by intestate succession. Such a result would be an anathema. 1 David T. Smith, Florida Probate Code Manual § 4.05, at 29-30 (1995). We agree that, in cases in which there is no surviving spouse or minor children, the protections against creditors found in the homestead provision may inure to the benefit of the person to whom the homestead property is devised by will. As explained below, though, the class of persons to which such protections may be devised is limited.