Watson v. Santalucia

NEELY, Justice:

The question before us is what happens when a stock splits immediately before the death of a testator, and the testator has left a specific number of shares to his heirs. Traditionally, we viewed such a question as turning on whether the bequest was “specific” or “general” and then applied the result thought to follow automatically from the chosen label. However, the problems created by the use of the distinction between “general” and “specific” legacies in the stock split situation far outweigh any advantages to be gained by relying on those classifications. Instead we adopt…