Right of survivorship¶
Right of survivorship is a recurring identity in social sciences, humanities, and arts defined by this frozen evidence: In property law, a concurrent estate or co-tenancy is any of various ways in which property is owned by more than one person at a time.
Core Idea¶
A right of survivorship is an incident of certain forms of concurrent ownership under which a deceased co-owner's interest passes automatically to the surviving co-owner or co-owners. In a common-law joint tenancy, each joint tenant holds an undivided interest coupled with survivorship. At death, the decedent's share does not ordinarily pass through a will or intestate estate; the surviving title expands by operation of the ownership arrangement. Tenancy by the entirety commonly supplies a related form for spouses, subject to the jurisdiction's rules.
Scope of Application¶
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Real-property joint tenancy. Instrument language and statutory formalities create present undivided interests with survivorship.
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Tenancy by the entirety. Spousal ownership adds jurisdiction-specific limits and creditor consequences.
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Bank and securities accounts. Statutory designations and beneficial-ownership evidence determine death transfer.
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Estate planning. Survivorship is coordinated with wills, trusts, taxes, and intended beneficiary outcomes.
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Title examination. Creation, registration, transfers, and severance are traced through the ownership record.
Clarity¶
Right of survivorship is an incident of specified concurrent ownership under which a deceased co-owner's interest passes automatically to surviving co-owners rather than through probate. It is not created by co-ownership in general; tenancy in common lacks it, and jurisdictional formalities govern joint tenancy or tenancy by the entirety. Severance can change the destination before death.
Manages Complexity¶
Right of survivorship compresses a co-owner's death transfer to estate form, surviving owners, severance status, and jurisdictional incident. If valid and unsevered, title expands automatically outside the decedent's probate estate; if absent or severed, the share follows ordinary succession or transfer rules. Joint tenancy, tenancy by the entirety, and tenancy in common form distinct branches.
Abstract Reasoning¶
Title move. Determine whether property is held in a form that grants surviving co-owners automatic succession to a deceased owner's interest. Event move. At death, distinguish transfer by survivorship from passage through will, intestacy, or probate estate. Severance move. Test whether deed, agreement, sale, partition, divorce, or unilateral act converted the ownership form before death. Priority move. Reconcile recording, creditor, tax, spousal, and jurisdiction-specific consequences. Boundary move.
Knowledge Transfer¶
Within the home domain. Right of survivorship transfers across real-property, bank-account, securities, marital-property, and estate-planning contexts where a deceased co-owner's interest passes automatically to surviving co-owners under a recognized ownership form. Title, deed language, severance, death, probate exclusion, and recording retain legal roles. Beyond the home domain (C — legal incident). It applies literally only to legal interests carrying the incident; organizational succession is analogy. Its boundary is doctrinal: multiple names on an asset do not necessarily create survivorship, acts before death can sever it, and creditor, tax, spousal, and jurisdiction-specific rules affect consequences.
Relationships to Other Abstractions¶
Current abstraction Right of survivorship Domain-specific
Parents (1) — more general patterns this builds on
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Right of survivorship is a kind of Property Rights Prime
Right of survivorship is a domain-specific kind of Property Rights: Right of survivorship is a recurring identity in social sciences, humanities, and arts defined by this frozen evidence: In property law, a concurrent estate or co-tenancy is any of various ways in which property is owned by more than one person at a time.
Hierarchy path (1) — routes to 1 parentless root
- Right of survivorship → Property Rights → Boundary
Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶
Right of survivorship sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (74th percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.
Family — Inheritance & Succession Law (7 abstractions)
Nearest neighbors
- Estate planning — 0.86
- Advancement (inheritance) — 0.85
- Four Unities — 0.85
- Saisine — 0.83
- Demobilization — 0.82
Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-08