The Columbarium: Beware the dead hand!
The Columbarium is a free, weekly newsletter where the history of death and dying meets practical advice about the same. Enjoy this issue from the archive—and if you like it, consider signing up!
Also, this particular issue is from Halloween. But I prefer to honor spooky season in my heart year round.
Happy almost Halloween, my spooky friends. On this most terrifying of holidays, I want to tell you a story not of haunted cemeteries or grisly deaths. No—these are mild shocks compared to the abject horror of ESTATE LAW!
Rather than speaking or writing like normal humans, lawyers prefer to use terminology that either sounds like it came from the ancient, arcane tomes of some ominous cult, or like it was designed by a sadistic bureaucrat to be as dull as possible. (Sorry to lawyers, but it’s true.)
The former explains why there is an actual legal concept known as “dead hand control.”
As much as this evokes images of a rotting claw bursting forth from graveyard dirt, dead hand control simply refers to a person’s ability to continue controlling their property after their death. If you have a will and/or a trust, and then you die, your dead hand determines what happens to your stuff via that will and/or trust.
The dead hand can place conditions on the distribution of its property—for example, I leave my house to my beloved son Reginald on the condition he keep it painted pink in perpetuity. But the dead hand CAN’T require anything illegal—for example, I leave my house to my beloved son Reginald on the condition he assassinates at least one public figure.
Where did this eerie term come from? It was coined by English lawyer and judge Sir Arthur Hobhouse, a.k.a. the 1st Baron Hobhouse, in his 1880 book The Dead Hand: Addresses on the Subject of Endowments and Settlements of Property—which you can read on the Internet Archive if you’re so inclined!
I can’t find much information about why the phrase “dead hand” specifically stuck around. But it may have had something to do with the book’s fourth chapter, “The Property of Married Women,” and a related lecture he gave a few years earlier at the 1868 Social Science Congress at Birmingham.
Apparently Hobhouse was quite the social reformer. He believed in the radical notion that married women should be able to own property instead of giving it all to their husbands. Wild. His legal efforts on the subject are credited with (slowly) changing English law accordingly. He was a well-known dude, at least within the legal community.
He died in 1904 and (fun fact!) was cremated at London’s oldest crematorium. Because he had no children, he was not only the 1st Baron Hobhouse, but also the last.
Worried about the impending dead hands in your life? Here’s some info about wills and trusts.
Sources: Wikipedia, Cornell Law School’s Legal Information Institute, The Internet Archive, Wikisource