Overview
Forced heirship laws are most prevalent among civil law jurisdictions and in Islamic countries; these include major countries such as France, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and most other countries in the world. Reckoning shares in instances of multiple or no children and lack of surviving spouse vary from country to country.
Advocates of forced heirship contend that it is perfectly proper for testators to be required to make adequate provision for their dependents, and that most countries in the world permit wills to be varied where they would leave dependents destitute. Critics suggest that there is a great difference between varying wills to the minimum degree to provide sufficient financial support for dependents and prohibiting the testator from distributing the estate or a proportion of the estate to any female children, or younger male children, and that it cannot be any less repugnant to force a deceased person to distribute their assets in a certain manner on their death than it would be to tell them how they may do so during their lifetime.
Read more about this topic: Forced Heirship