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The process of probate in Ontario is a legal process where a court approves the validity of a will and grants authority to the executor named in the will to distribute the deceased person's assets according to the instructions in the will. The process involves several steps. [3]
A probate court (sometimes called a surrogate court) is a court that has competence in a jurisdiction to deal with matters of probate and the administration of estates. [1] In some jurisdictions, such courts may be referred to as orphans' courts [ 2 ] or courts of ordinary.
In common law jurisdictions, probate is the judicial process whereby a will is "proved" in a court of law and accepted as a valid public document that is the true last testament of the deceased; or whereby, in the absence of a legal will, the estate is settled according to the laws of intestacy that apply in the state where the deceased resided at the time of their death.
The court does this by granting letters of administration to the person so entitled. Grants of administration may be either general (where the deceased has died intestate) or limited. [1] The order in which the court will make general grants of letters follows the sequence: The surviving spouse, or civil partner, as the case may be; The next of ...
The divisions of the High Court of Justice were abolished. The Appellate Division consisted of two divisional courts which had the same jurisdiction. [57] The names of the Appellate Division and High Court Division were changed to "Court of Appeal for Ontario" (its current name) and "High Court of Justice for Ontario", respectively, in 1931. [62]
The first is the term "provincial court", which has two quite different meanings, depending on context. The first, and most general meaning, is that a provincial court is a court established by the legislature of a province, under its constitutional authority over the administration of justice in the province, set out in s. 92(14) of the Constitution Act, 1867. [2]
A court can accept an informal will if it is judged to be an authentic representation of the decedent's last wishes. An informal will can "be found in almost any form and made in almost any manner"; [ 61 ] in 2017, an "unsent text message with a smiley face" was ruled to be a legally binding will.
Intestacy has a limited application in those jurisdictions that follow civil law or Roman law because the concept of a will is itself less important; the doctrine of forced heirship automatically gives a deceased person's next-of-kin title to a large part (forced estate) of the estate's property by operation of law, beyond the power of the deceased person to defeat or exceed by testamentary gift.