Turner v. Metropolitan Life Insurance

KNIGHT, J. Plaintiff, by his guardian ad litem, brought this action against the defendant insurance company to collect $1,250 claimed to be due him as beneficiary under a policy of life insurance. The administratrices of the insured’s estate presented an adverse claim to the money and were granted leave to file a complaint in intervention; whereupon and on stipulation the insurance company paid the money into court and was discharged from further liability. Thereafter the cause was tried on the merits and judgment was entered in favor of plaintiff. Prom said judgment the interveners have taken this appeal, which is presented on a clerk’s transcript consisting of the judgment roll and the written opinion rendered by the trial court.

The policy sued upon is dated November 6, 1939, and is of the type known as a Master Group Policy. It was issued by said company to the Certain-Teed Products Company for the benefit of its employees, one of whom was Lewis William [864]Turner; and the beneficiary clause read: “If there be no designated beneficiary at the time when any benefits shall be payable to the beneficiary, then such benefits shall be payable as follows: To the wife or husband, if living, of the employee; if not living, to the children of the employee who survive the employee, equally; if none survives, to either the father or the mother of the employee, or to both equally; if none of the above survives the employee, to the estate of the employee.”

Turner, the insured, died June 25, 1941. He had been married, but there were no children the issue of the marriage, and his wife predeceased him. The plaintiff is Turner’s child, but he is a posthumous, illegitimate child, born shortly after Turner’s death; and the interveners contended that the designation “children” in the policy as one of the classes of beneficiaries excluded illegitimate children. The trial court held adversely to such contention, and the interveners urge that this was error.

The contention so made by the interveners is based on the common law, the substance of the argument made by them in this behalf being that under the common law illegitimates are held to be nullius filii; that as the sons of nobody they are deemed to have no inheritable blood; that they themselves may not inherit, nor can they transmit property by inheritance, except to their own lineal descendants; that notwithstanding some of the harsh and oppressive restrictions imposed upon illegitimates by the common law have been done away with in this state by statutory enactments, particularly by providing that an illegitimate may inherit from his mother and his mother from him, the rule of the common law still prevails that denies to an illegitimate the right to inherit from his father, and to his father and his father’s kin the right to inherit from him, save under conditions specified in sections 255 and 256 of the Probate Code, which do not here exist; that therefore in the absence of statutory enactment granting to illegitimates full equal status with legitimates, the trial court herein was bound to hold against plaintiff in conformity with the common law definition of “children,” which includes only children born in lawful wedlock. The two principal eases relied upon by the interveners as sustaining their view are Wolf v. Gall, 32 Cal.App. 286 [163 P. 346, 350], and Estate of Paterson, 34 Cal.App.2d 305 [93 P.2d 825].