A one sentence section that borrows its content
The laws used to determine paternity and relationships for the purposes of intestate succession apply when determining whether class gift terminology and terms of relationship include adopted persons and persons born out of wedlock.
Section 736.1102, Florida Statutes.
Trust documents are written in family words such as descendants, issue, children, my nieces and nephews. Whether a given person falls inside one of those words is a legal question, and this section answers it by pointing at the intestacy rules rather than restating them.
The effect is consistency. Whoever would be treated as your child if you died without a will is treated as your child for the purposes of a class gift in a trust.
The case, and it is a striking one
In 2011 a beneficiary of a trust created in 1989 adopted a 27 year old woman, someone she had known since birth and treated as a daughter. The adoption changed who would inherit under the trust, and another beneficiary went to court to stop it.
The Fourth District held the adoptee could inherit.
current Florida probate statutes treat adopted persons, both young and adult, equally with their biological counterparts. See § 736.1102, Fla. Stat. (2011) ... There is no statutory basis to preclude an adult adoptee from inheriting under a trust. Whether the adult adoption is in derogation of a settlor’s intent is an entirely separate issue.
Dennis v. Kline, 120 So. 3d 11 (Fla. 4th DCA 2013), Gross, J.
Two things in that passage deserve attention.
Both young and adult. Florida draws no age line. An adoption is an adoption, and the resulting relationship is treated like a biological one for class gift purposes.
An entirely separate issue. The court was careful to say it was deciding a question of statutory construction, not blessing the tactic. Whether an adult adoption defeats what the settlor wanted is a different argument, and this decision does not foreclose it.
The road Florida did not take
The court did something useful for anyone researching this. It set out the Uniform Probate Code provision that would have produced the opposite result, under which an adoptee is not treated as the child of the adoptive parent, when construing a disposition by someone who is not the adoptive parent, unless the adoption took place before the adoptee was 18, or the adoptive parent was a stepparent or foster parent, or functioned as a parent before the adoptee turned 18.
It then recorded that in 1974 the Florida Legislature created a study commission to consider adopting the Uniform Probate Code, debated it, and kept the approach of the 1933 Florida Probate Act instead, choosing only to follow the Uniform Probate Code’s format where possible.
That converts a silence into a decision. Florida does not lack an adult adoption restriction by oversight. It looked at one and did not enact it, which is why the court declined to supply it.
The court refused to extend the case law to create a public policy impediment, on the view that this is the Legislature’s business rather than a court’s.
What this means when drafting or reading
If you are writing a trust and want to limit who can come into a class, say it in the document. Section 736.1101 makes the rules of construction in this Part yield to a contrary intent indicated by the terms of the trust, so a definition of descendants that excludes persons adopted after a certain age, or after the settlor’s death, will be given effect. Silence gets you the statutory default, and the statutory default is inclusive.
If you are reading an existing trust and an adoption has changed the picture, the question is not whether the adoption was strategic. It is whether the trust’s own words exclude the adoptee. Absent that, this section brings them in.
Once you know who is in the class, section 736.1103 decides how they share, and the answer for descendants and other multigeneration classes is per stirpes.