Court Opinion

ID: 9669406
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-24 02:55:09.218629+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:15:56.343806
License: Public Domain

Black, J.
(concurring in remand). Refer back to my dissent, In re Powers Estate, 362 Mich 222,
*182235-241. The initial paragraph of that dissent foretold what has so far ensued:
“I know of no better way to legalize the Jarndyced mulct of a testator’s fat estate than to lay down an unqualified rule that his collaterally distant heirs, all of whom have been previously and steadily disinherited by a series of produced, proven, and fully residuary testaments, are eligible as contestants of what purports to be his latest will.”
Now that this first will contest has gone on to one trial measuring eight weeks, and now that it must go back for another, it seems to me that what remains of our 1961 majority should examine again its holding (362 Mich 222-234); a holding which has permitted these collaterally distant and six-times previously disinherited relatives to remain in the contest as intruder contestants and record clutterers.
During his jury argument counsel for such relatives unreservedly conceded that his clients as contestants could obtain nothing in view of the “six prior wills that all disinherit the heirs.”- (See full quotation in Justice O’Hara’s opinion.) Does not some Brother, one at very least, perceive at long last a potent reason why this contest took so long to try? Is not some other Brother convinced, just by the bills against this estate (for counsel fees and litigatory expenses) which have already been approved, that something (especially when it is within this Court’s power) should be done to assure that retrial of this first contest should be confined to the sole issue, that is, the issue made by’ the petition fox-probate of will and the prosecutor’s -notice of contest?*
The contest raging over this estate, considering its monetary size and the involvement of charitable *183bequests as made in the immediately preceding testament, is due in the absence of immediately needful superintendence to reflect odiously on Michigan’s “one court of justice” (of which our Court is the responsible head; Const 1963, art 6, § 1). To meet the situation there should be added, to our mandate of reversal, a direction that the circuit court enter an order striking from the record the notice of contest these collateral relatives have filed.
Adams, J., took no part in the decision of this case.

 The petition for probate and notice of contest by those eligible to contest frame the triable issue, In re Reid’s Estate, 248 Mich 360.