Civil and common-law traditions treat surviving spouses and children differently. The surviving spouse has come to be increasingly protected in common-
beneficiaries of inheritances. The attribution of individualist or traditionalist traits to legal concepts of inheritance seems to be futile when legal history is taken into account. The social consequences of inheritance rules depend on the specific historical, social, and economic conditions under which the rules function.The main legal institutions of civil law have traditionally been property, contract, tort, and the family. Scholars of legal and social change claim that property, contract, and tort law, although adjusted to the needs of changing markets, still preserve their original structure transplanted from Roman law.1 Family law, in contrast, depends and depended on contemporary legal ideologies 2 -with the consequence that marriage, divorce, custody, filiation, and support laws have been changed as a result of the move toward empowerment, participation and responsibility, autonomy, self-control, and individual ethics, itself a corollary of the triumphal march of the legal ideals of liberty, equality, and security. 3 The reformers have generally inferred the necessity of legal change from the facts of social change. The second demographic revolution, with its decreasing marriage ratios and increasing divorce and illegitimacy ratios, has been interpreted as a deinstitutionalization of the traditional nuclear family, with the consequence that the legal privileges and traditional barriers that protected marriage have been abolished. The legal concept of "subjective rights" was extended to the field of 208 Barbara Willenbacher is a senior lecturer for the sociology of law at the law faculty of Hannover University. She is engaged in sociolegal research on the law, the family, and gender relations. She has published "The Changing Role of Professionals in
