Miami Probate Law Blog

When we come across an interesting probate case, we sometimes struggle with how much research to do. Writing about the Novack murders prompted a quick trip to the archives to read up on Miami's Fountainebleau Hotel. Perhaps that was a pride of place moment, though, and not a research-nerd moment. At any rate, in our discussion of the Kardashian daughters' lawsuit against their father's widow, we have not gone in search of the published diary excerpts or gone to Westlaw to find out more about Robert Kardashian's career. 

For us, the background is not the most interesting part of this will dispute -- the Kardashians' response to the diary entries' publication is. When the family learned of the diary and photographs, the daughters copyrighted the diary, and their mother copyrighted a family picture of her girls with their dad. 

It may seem odd, but there is such a thing as "blog envy." We have smugly discussed our in-depth, multi-part posts about James Brown's estate, the Astors and other celebrities, but we admit to the tiniest bout of jealousy every time our family law blog colleagues nabbed another Kardashian headline. Well, our day has finally come.

The legal claim is for copyright infringement, but the issue is really what constituted "tangible personal property" under the late Robert Kardashian's will. The famous attorney -- or infamous, as he became a household word for his part in defending O.J. Simpson -- died in 2003. In addition to his ex-wife and their daughters, he left behind a fortune and a widow. And he had a will.

Willa Cather wanted her work to speak for itself. She did not want her id and ego and superego injected into her fiction; she wanted her characters' ids and egos and so on to be the point. She must have been a fan of the New Criticism movement in literature and literary analysis. The men and women -- well, mostly men behind New Criticism believed that literature stood apart from history and the daily lives of authors, that the words on the page were such a powerful expression of the human condition that context was unimportant.

Even if she weren't a New Critic, she wanted her private life kept private, and that really annoyed scholars. For years during her life and after her death critics and researchers badgered Cather or her estate about gaining access to her private letters. When she and then her first two executors rebuffed so many advances, those researchers became suspicious. They suggested she must have something to hide to guard her privacy so fiercely. And, you know, she never married, so that deep dark secret must be that she was a lesbian. And, if that were true, she must have been so deeply ashamed of her deep, dark secret that she wanted any evidence of it destroyed.

Another story of a very private celebrity's wishes being set aside crossed our path recently. The writer is Willa Cather, the woman whose works centered on the American Frontier, the Great Plains of the American Midwest. These were hard places in her day, during the first half of the 20th Century -- not that they are any easier now, come to think of it. Snow birds from that part of the country are staying longer in Florida this year to avoid the actual snowfall. In April.

Rumor has had it for a long time that Cather destroyed much of her personal correspondence. She wanted to be remembered for her work; she did not like the public scrutiny of her private life, and literary scholars have long taken exception. How can we truly understand her work, they said, if we know nothing of her inner thoughts and feelings. Cather's will specifically directed her executors to keep private things private, though, and they did so for almost 70 years.