Short answers, pulled from the story.
Inheritance is the practice of receiving private property, titles, debts, entitlements, privileges, rights, and obligations upon the death of an individual. In legal terms, succession is the process by which a deceased person's rights and property transfer to their heirs, while inheritance is the property or assets those heirs receive.
In modern law, the terms inheritance and heir apply only to property passed by intestate succession, meaning from a person who dies without a will. Property distributed under a will passes instead to beneficiaries, who may be called devisees for real property, legatees for money, and recipients of bequests for other personal property.
Forced heirship is a system in Louisiana, the only US state whose legal system derives from the Napoleonic Code, that prohibits the disinheritance of adult children except for a few narrowly defined reasons a parent is obligated to prove. In civil law nations, the right of children to inherit in predefined ratios is enshrined in law, a principle traceable to the Code of Hammurabi around 1750 BC.
Jewish law is patrimonial, with the firstborn son entitled under the Law of Moses to twice the share of other sons, and daughters inheriting only when there are no sons. Christianity at first kept Jewish traditions but shifted after Emperor Constantine's accession in 306 toward a Judeo-Christian pattern. Islamic law, under Quran verses 4:11, 4:12, and 4:176, grants a son twice a daughter's share and added nine relatives as heirs who had no rights before.
An estimated 25 trillion dollars in inheritance is projected to be transmitted across generations by 2050. The average US inheritance was 39,000 dollars in 1985, and the total annual figure later more than doubled to nearly 200 billion dollars.
Inheritance is described as a basic mechanism of class stratification, operating through cultural capital, gifts between the living, and the transfer of estates at death. People who receive an inheritance are more likely to own a home regardless of its size, and over 60 percent of the Forbes richest 400 Americans in September 2012 grew up in substantial privilege.
The first communist government installed after the Russian Revolution resolved to abolish the right of inheritance, with some exceptions, regardless of whether the wealth came from a person's own labor or from exploiting others. Communism rests on the Marxist Labor Theory of Value, which justifies money only when earned through one's own work.