Court Opinion

ID: 9427398
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-02 23:20:35.02326+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:23:06.764282
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Blackmun,
concurring in the judgment.
I agree with the result the Court has reached and concur in its judgment. I also agree with much that has been said in the plurality opinion. My point of departure, of course, is at the plurality’s valiant struggle to distinguish, rather than overrule, Trimble v. Gordon, 430 U. S. 762 (1977), decided just the Term before last, and involving a small probate estate (an automobile worth approximately $2,500) and a sad and appealing fact situation. Four Members of the Court, like the Supreme Court of Illinois, found the case “constitutionally indistinguishable from Labine v. Vincent, 401 U. S. 532 (1971),” and were in dissent. Id., at 776, 777.
It seems to me that the Court today gratifyingly reverts to the principles set forth in Labine v. Vincent. What Mr. Justice Black said for the Court in Labine applies with equal *277force to the present case and, as four of us thought, to the Illinois situation with which Trimble was concerned.
I would overrule Trimble, but the Court refrains from doing so on the theory that the result in Trimble is justified because of the peculiarities of the Illinois Probate Act there under consideration. This, of course, is an explanation, but, for me, it is an unconvincing one. I therefore must regard Timble as a derelict, explainable only because of the overtones of its appealing facts, and offering little precedent for constitutional analysis of State intestate succession laws. If Trimble is not a derelict, the corresponding statutes of other States will be of questionable validity until this Court passes on them, one by one, as being on the Trimble side of the line or the Labine-Lalli side.