Historically, when a husband and wife were in the process of being divorced and one died their status remained as if married, and division of the probate marital property would occur under the probate rules of Title 20. Effective January 28, 2005, the foregoing changed, and equitable distribution under certain circumstances may now occur even after one of the spouses has died. Title 23 now provides that “[I]n the event one party dies during the course of divorce proceedings, no decree of divorce has been entered and grounds ...
What happens when an individual never removed his divorced spouse as a beneficiary of his employer’s Savings and Investment Plan (SIP) and then dies? The recent U. S. Supreme Court case of Kennedy v. DuPont, 129 S.Ct. 865, 172 L.Ed.2d 662 (1/26/2009) answered this question in a unanimous decision authored by Justice Souter. The Court determined the plan document controlled what happened to the benefits. If the plan document stipulated release of the money to the divorced spouse, regardless of a non-QDRO divorce decree directing otherwise, because the decedent neglected to change the designated beneficiary from the ...
An anti-lapse statute is a rule of interpretation that is intended to cure a will to ensure that the next individual in line of a pre-deceased child or certain other close relatives receive testator’s devise or bequest. 20 Pa. C.S. § 2514(9). Specifically, the Pennsylvania anti-lapse statute states that “[A] devise or bequest to a child or other issue of the testator …shall not lapse if the beneficiary shall fail to survive the testator and shall leave issue surviving the testator but shall pass to such surviving issue who shall take per stirpes the share which their deceased ...
