Jennifer Rogiers was a few weeks short of her twenty-second birthday when she died in 2005. Because of a cervical cord injury at birth, she had received a $2.6 million medical malpractice judgment, which had paid for most of her care during her short life. With her death, the New Jersey courts were asked to determine how the remaining money in Jennifer’s trust should be divided. Should her father receive a share? Should her mother be paid for “child support,” or for care she had provided?

Jennifer’s short life had been marked by tragedy and conflict; she was severely handicapped as a result of her birth injury, and her mother was her primary caretaker. At one point her mother had violated a court order and taken her to Ecuador. Jennifer’s father had not been actively involved and had not paid child support—though her mother had never filed a request for support, either.

Jennifer’s father insisted that he was one of her heirs, and entitled to receive half of the remaining trust assets. Her mother claimed that she should be reimbursed for care she had provided, that any share paid to Jennifer’s father should be reduced by the amount of child support she should have been paid, and that he wasn’t really a “parent,” since the essence of parenting is the provision of care and support.

New Jersey’s intermediate appellate court decided that Jennifer’s father was in fact her heir—New Jersey law does not allow the courts to deny a parent’s right to inherit from his child simply because he was not a very good parent. The court also denied Jennifer’s mother’s claim for child support to be collected from the trust—in these facts, the court determined that any child support claim expired upon Jennifer’s death. The court also ordered the trial judge to reconsider his award reimbursing Jennifer’s mother for expenses she incurred during Jennifer’s life, noting that it appeared some of those expenses might actually have been paid by Jennifer’s trust. In the Matter of Rogiers, October 23, 2007.

Would Jennifer’s father have received half of her estate under Arizona law? Perhaps not. The New Jersey court explicitly discussed the impact of provisions of the Uniform Probate Code, which Arizona has adopted and New Jersey has not. That law precludes inheritance from a child’s estate by either parent unless he or she “has openly treated the child as a natural child and has not refused to support the child.” (see Arizona Revised Statutes section 14-2114(C))

Arizona’s approach might still require a trial focusing on whether Jennifer’s father had “refused” to support her, or had just failed to do so voluntarily. Still, an uninvolved parent does not automatically inherit from or through a child in Arizona—unlike New Jersey.

Incidentally, our thanks go to Idaho colleague (and Special Needs Alliance member) Dennis Voorhees for pointing out this interesting New Jersey case. Idaho, like Arizona, is a Uniform Probate Code state—but the Idaho version does not include the language quoted here. That leaves the result of a similar case in Idaho very much uncertain.

It is interesting—to us, at least—to note this example of state law differences. Generally speaking the various states take similar approaches to most legal questions, and especially to questions involving probate and estates, since that area of the law was in many respects fairly well-settled even before the United States separated from British rule. Here is an illustration of how that principle does not always hold true. 

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