“Downton Abbey” made me a rock star. Not quite the cocktail-party cachet of, say, a CEO with a hot start-up heading for an IPO, or even of a ticketholder to the next Yo-Yo Ma concert. Instead I’m getting button-holed in social settings simply because I can explain details of a seminal storyline of the smash BBC hit.
My hook? I’m an estate planning attorney.
Indeed, after two full seasons “Downton” aficionados are now intimately familiar with the “entail” — or “fee tail”— and its central role in the upstairs-downstairs drama of the fictional Crawley family, its staff and the Yorkshire country house of the Earl and Countess of Grantham. In short, the entirety of Earl Grantham’s estate — including his American wife’s fortune — may pass only to a male heir. Because the Earl has only daughters, a distant (and — gasp — decidedly middle-class) male cousin becomes the heir apparent. The entail precludes the Earl from bequeathing any part of the estate to his own daughters.
READ MORE: http://bostonglobe.com/opinion/2012/05/07/the-entail-entails-all/JgBsXjpiz8uOO3mac2IJ6L/story.html
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