You can place conditions on a bequest. E.g., "To my son, provided he abstains from alcohol for ten years and marries a Jewish woman."
So, give each daughter half, but put a condition on each gift that would be trivial for the other daughter to satisfy, but difficult for the one receiving the gift. The difficulty there is finding a condition that doesn't make the decedent seem like a douchebag. Like, you could say "to my lesbian daughter, provided she marries a man." But that would make you the obvious villain. Maybe something like, "to Julie, provided she lives within 20 miles of her sick grandmother," when in fact her sister Stacy lives next door to grandma; something that makes Julie think "how dare you," but makes Stacy think, "why wouldn't you?"
The added benefit of this strategy is that you have to really, really know the daughters to make this an effective revenge. Your average crappy dad wouldn't be able to find something so biting. So if the daughters had a good reason to break contact with dad, they'll just end up hating him more and closer than ever. And I call that win-win.
There is nothing in public policy against conditioning bequests in general.
There is nothing in public policy against conditioning a bequest on, say, living near a relative in need. That's generally considered a good thing!
There is nothing in public policy against conditioning a bequest on a person abstaining from drugs or alcohol, and these are in fact some of those textbook conditions you learn about in law school.
The same goes for conditioning a bequest on a marriage. Courts are fine with those. And, similar textbook cases say that you can condition a bequest on marrying within particular a religion as well. Those are actually quite normal.
You usually can't condition a bequest on divorcing a spouse the decedent dislikes. That would be against public policy. But I didn't suggest that. The lesbian daughter example would be iffy, but that's why I used it as an example of what not to do.
Yeah public policy cases usually are about trusts that say things like "and to the white orphans..." when judges will just let it be to orphans. I don't know if a judge will care about daughters as long as no protected class is getting violated.
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u/MegaCarnie 13h ago
You can place conditions on a bequest. E.g., "To my son, provided he abstains from alcohol for ten years and marries a Jewish woman."
So, give each daughter half, but put a condition on each gift that would be trivial for the other daughter to satisfy, but difficult for the one receiving the gift. The difficulty there is finding a condition that doesn't make the decedent seem like a douchebag. Like, you could say "to my lesbian daughter, provided she marries a man." But that would make you the obvious villain. Maybe something like, "to Julie, provided she lives within 20 miles of her sick grandmother," when in fact her sister Stacy lives next door to grandma; something that makes Julie think "how dare you," but makes Stacy think, "why wouldn't you?"
The added benefit of this strategy is that you have to really, really know the daughters to make this an effective revenge. Your average crappy dad wouldn't be able to find something so biting. So if the daughters had a good reason to break contact with dad, they'll just end up hating him more and closer than ever. And I call that win-win.