Decided on October 8, 1889, Riggs v. Palmer is the New York Court of Appeals decision that stopped a grandson from inheriting under his grandfather’s will after he murdered the grandfather to secure the estate. Cited as 115 N.Y. 506, the 5–2 ruling held that a will valid in every formal respect still could not deliver property to the person who killed the testator, because a deeper principle of the common law forbids anyone from profiting by their own crime. That holding became the seed of what probate lawyers today call the slayer rule.
What Happened Between Francis and Elmer Palmer
On August 13, 1880, Francis B. Palmer signed a will leaving small legacies to his two daughters, Mrs. Riggs and Mrs. Preston, and the remainder of his estate, including a farm and considerable personal property, to his grandson Elmer E. Palmer. Elmer knew the will’s terms. He also knew his grandfather had started thinking about changing them. To lock in the inheritance and receive it sooner, Elmer poisoned Francis to death.1New York State Courts. Riggs v Palmer
Elmer was tried and convicted of second-degree murder and was serving his sentence in a state reformatory when the civil dispute over the estate began.2McMaster University. Riggs v Palmer Despite the conviction, he moved to collect what the will gave him. The document satisfied every requirement under New York’s statutes governing how wills are made and executed, and nothing in those statutes explicitly disqualified a murderer. The probate court found no textual basis to stop the transfer.
Francis Palmer’s daughters sued to block their nephew from taking the estate, arguing that basic justice prohibited anyone from acquiring wealth by killing the person who left it to them. The trial court sided with Elmer on the ground that the statute was clear and contained no disqualification for murder. The daughters appealed to the New York Court of Appeals, which took the case with seven judges sitting.
The Majority Opinion: Judge Earl
Judge Earl wrote for the majority, joined by four other judges. His central move was to read the statute of wills against its purpose. The legislators who drafted those formal requirements were trying to prevent fraud and honor the wishes of testators. They were not trying to protect someone who killed the testator to keep those wishes from changing.1New York State Courts. Riggs v Palmer
Earl called this equitable construction. A statute’s purpose matters as much as its literal words, and he invited the thought experiment of asking the lawmakers directly whether they meant to reach the result Elmer wanted. No rational legislator, he reasoned, would answer yes.2McMaster University. Riggs v Palmer
He then reached for a broader ground. All laws and contracts, Earl wrote, are subject to “general, fundamental maxims of the common law,” and one of them controlled the case: “No one shall be permitted to profit by his own fraud, or to take advantage of his own wrong, or to found any claim upon his own iniquity, or to acquire property by his own crime.”1New York State Courts. Riggs v Palmer The maxim was so deeply embedded in the tradition, he argued, that every statute should be read as if it already contained it. The legislature did not need to write “murderers cannot inherit,” because the common law had been saying so for centuries. The court barred Elmer from the inheritance and directed the estate to pass to the daughters.
The Dissenting Opinion: Judge Gray
Judge Gray dissented, joined by Judge Danforth. He agreed that Elmer’s crime was reprehensible, but he insisted the court’s job was to apply the law the legislature actually wrote. Gray walked through the New York statutes in careful detail. The legislature had spelled out exactly how a will could be made, changed, and revoked, and had specified that no will “shall be revoked or altered otherwise” than through those listed procedures. Murder was not on the list. Since it was not on the list, Gray argued, the court had no power to add it. “Practically,” he wrote, “the court is asked to make another will for the testator.”1New York State Courts. Riggs v Palmer
His second argument cut harder. Stripping the inheritance, Gray said, amounted to an extra punishment layered on top of the criminal sentence. Elmer had already been tried, convicted, and imprisoned. “What power or warrant have the courts to add to the respondent’s penalties by depriving him of property?” He saw no authority for it in the constitution or the statutes, and he worried that the majority’s approach would invite judges to impose their personal sense of justice whenever they found a statute’s results distasteful. His dissent was a structural argument about who gets to change the law: if the statute had a gap, the legislature should close it.
How the Ruling Became the Slayer Rule
The majority’s reasoning did not stay a one-off. It became the foundation of a doctrine every state now enforces in some form. Currently, 47 states have enacted slayer statutes, and the remaining three rely on common-law precedent to reach the same result.3Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law. Expanding Slayer Statutes to Elder Abuse The core principle is that a person who feloniously and intentionally kills someone whose estate they stand to inherit is disqualified from taking any benefit from that death.
The Uniform Probate Code, used as a template in many states, codifies the rule in Section 2-803. Under that provision, a person who commits a qualifying homicide forfeits their intestate share, elective share, homestead allowance, exempt property, family allowance, and any disposition or appointment the decedent made in their favor. The property passes as if the killer had died before the victim, redirecting the assets to whoever would have been next in line.4Utah Legislature. Utah Code Section 75-2-803
A criminal conviction is not always required. Most slayer statutes let an interested party petition a civil court to establish the killing by a preponderance of the evidence, a lower bar than the criminal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt. That matters when the killer dies before trial, flees, or is acquitted on the criminal charges but the family still wants to block the inheritance.4Utah Legislature. Utah Code Section 75-2-803
The doctrine also reaches beyond wills. It applies to life insurance proceeds, joint tenancy property, and retirement accounts where the killer is a named beneficiary. Under the common-law version of the rule, a murderer is barred from collecting on a life insurance policy naming them as the beneficiary of the person they killed, and the proceeds typically go to a contingent beneficiary or the insured’s estate.5Legal Information Institute. Slayer Rule
Why the Case Is Still Taught
Riggs v. Palmer would probably sit as a footnote in probate history if the philosopher Ronald Dworkin had not made it the centerpiece of one of the twentieth century’s most important arguments about what law actually is. In his debate with H.L.A. Hart and the legal positivist tradition, Dworkin pointed to the case as proof that law is not merely a collection of written rules. Legal principles, like the maxim that no one should profit from their own wrong, carry genuine legal weight even when no statute codifies them.
For legal positivists, the law is whatever the legislature enacted and the courts have formally recognized. On that view, Gray’s dissent was correct: the statute said nothing about disqualifying murderers, so it did not disqualify them. Dworkin countered that judges do not just apply rules mechanically; they also draw on principles that emerge from the legal tradition as a whole. The majority in Riggs was not inventing law, Dworkin argued. It was recognizing law that was already there.
The case remains a staple of first-year law school curricula because it forces a question with no clean answer. When a statute’s text points one direction and basic justice points another, which one is the law? The majority and dissent in Riggs v. Palmer offer the two most durable answers the profession has produced, and neither has fully won. Legislatures have largely sided with the majority by codifying slayer rules, but the underlying tension between textual fidelity and moral reasoning still surfaces in courtrooms far removed from probate.