Letters to the Editor
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No legal right to the money...
And definately not a moral one. Carey can be pretty smart about some things, but it's clear that he doesn't have much knowledge of the law.
The LW is no longer in the relationship with the deceased woman's grandson, so her rights to the money are pretty tricky. Had they recieved the money before they actually split, the argument could be made that the LW had a right to the money as part of an equitable division of property. But they broke up before getting the money, so the picture then gets a lot murkier.
The will might seem straight forward, but any lawyer can tell you, wills are often not worth the paper they were written on. They are often outdated and do not reflect changing family dynamics. They are often contested and when non-blood relations end their links to the family, their rights to monies willed to them as a result of their relationship to a member of the family usually don't hold up in court. The will states that the money is to be devided between the heirs on their partners, not their former partners. The LW's legal ground is pretty shaky at best.
The LW has to ask some pretty tough questions. If the grandmother knew that the relationship had ended, would the LW still have been given a portion of the money? This isn't a question of what the LW feels they are owed from the pain of a bad relationship. Unless there is some proof that they are owed something financially by their former partner, the rights to actually claim a portion of the money are all but non-existant. When wills are contested, the court has to look into what was the intent of the deceased. If the LW was not specified by name as a seperate inheritance from her former partner, then the argument for keeping the money falls apart.