Legitime

Legitime is a principle of civil law and Roman law systems that limits a person's freedom to dispose of property by will, reserving a fixed portion of the estate that cannot be withheld from children or parents without a legally recognized cause. The term derives from the French heritier legitime, meaning rightful heir, and scholars trace the underlying concept to Greek law, from which it is thought the Romans borrowed it. In practice, legitime operates as a mandatory statutory share of a deceased person's estate that passes to the designated heirs in equal undivided portions, and this reserved share cannot be reduced to enlarge the portion left to a spouse or any other beneficiary, so a testator cannot defeat it through special gifts or by naming an alternative sole beneficiary. Bypassing an heir entitled to the legitime amounts to either preterition, an omission, or disinheritance, an express deprivation, and both are treated as violations of the doctrine. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/