Court Opinion

ID: 9551126
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 18:48:07.013805+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:23:06.114120
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice HARNSBERGER
(concurring).
Section 34-41, W.S.1957, making unnecessary the term “heirs” or other words of inheritance to create an estate in fee simple or to pass a lesser estate (for instance, a life estate with remainder over) rendered the Rule in Shelley’s Case obsolete in this jurisdiction because the words, “heirs,” “heirs of the body,” “heirs of the blood,” or any similar reference, were thereby robbed of significance as words of limitation. Consequently, when such words are used after grant of life estate, they merely designate the remaindermen.
The intention of the testatrix to create a lesser or life estate in her son David W. Crawford is clear and unmistakable. Had she inteded to devise a fee simple *658estate to her husband, Thomas G. Crawford, Paragraph Third of the will was unnecessary. Had she intended to give a remainder over in fee simple to' her sons, David W.- Crawford and Perry A. Barber, the words in Paragraph Third, “for their natural lives, each to'have one half thereof, that is to say, each shall have a life estate in one half of my property,” would not have been used, and, similarly, Paragraphs Fourth, Fifth and Sixth would not have been in the testament. There can be no legitimate doubt but that the testa-, trix believed and understood that she had left her property, first,' for life to her husband; second, after her husband’s death, to her two sons share and share alike for their lives; third, upon the death of both sons, the share of each - such son to his own heirs of his body in fee simple, if any such heirs were living at the time of death of the ancestor from whom they would take, but, if none such heirs were so living, then to the children of such heirs, if any, in fee simple, and, if none were living; then to the general heirs in fee simple.
The Rule in Shelley’s Case places a technical, legalistic meaning and significance to the word “heirs” as a word of limitation, which is neither known nor understood by the laity. By its enactment of § 34-41, W.S.19S7, our legislature, by plain implication, has as effectively renounced and abrogated the Rule in Shelley’s Case as being definitive of the extent of an estate passed, as if the statute had expressly repealed the same.
It is the duty of courts to give full effect to legislative intendment, especially in its efforts to erase the technical, the labored reasonings, finely drawn distinctions, and the fictions, which were implanted in the common law as it came to us in 1607, as rules of decision only, but which are no longer appropriate or controlling.
This principle announced in Fuchs v. Goe, 62 Wyo. 134, 174, 163 P.2d 783, 798, 166 A.L.R. 1329, holding this court will not follow the common law adopted by § 8-17, W.S.1957, as a rule of decision when it is not applicable to the habits and conditions of our society or its circumstances, stands on even firmer grounds where the legislature has erased the need for the very words upon which the Rule in Shelley’s Case is predicated.
These are additional reasons to deny the widow more than 25 percent of the- property, of David W. Crawford.