By Claire Benoit
The direct answer: When a Louisiana resident dies without a valid will, La. Civ. Code art. 880 sends the estate to descendants, ascendants, and collaterals by blood or adoption, and to a surviving spouse, in a fixed order the deceased has no power to change after the fact. Children and other descendants come first and inherit ahead of everyone else; if there are none, the estate passes to a mix of the surviving spouse, parents, and siblings depending on exactly who survives; more distant relatives are reached only if none of those exist. Community property and separate property are treated differently throughout, and a surviving spouse's rights depend heavily on which category applies and whether descendants survive.
This is what Louisiana law calls intestate succession, and it applies automatically any time a person dies without a testament that disposes of the property, or with a testament that a court later finds invalid or incomplete.
Louisiana is a community property state, and that distinction runs through every intestate succession. Community property is, generally, property either spouse acquired during the marriage through effort or earnings; separate property is property owned before the marriage, acquired by inheritance or donation during the marriage, or otherwise excluded from the community. A surviving spouse already owns one-half of the community property outright, so only the deceased's one-half interest in community property, plus all of the deceased's separate property, actually passes through the succession. The intestacy rules below apply to the deceased's share of the community property and to the deceased's separate property, but the two categories are not always treated identically, particularly where a surviving spouse is involved.
La. Civ. Code art. 888 gives descendants — children, grandchildren, and further lineal descendants — priority over every other class of heir. They take the deceased's separate property, and the deceased's share of community property subject to the surviving spouse's usufruct discussed below. Descendants in the same degree, such as all of the deceased's own children, take in equal shares by heads. Where a descendant in a closer degree has predeceased the deceased but left descendants of their own, those more remote descendants take by representation, discussed further below.
If the deceased leaves no descendants, La. Civ. Code art. 889 gives the surviving spouse the deceased's share of the community property in full ownership, with no usufruct or naked ownership involved, since there are no descendants for a usufruct to protect.
Separate property follows a different path when there are no descendants. Under La. Civ. Code art. 891, if the deceased leaves no descendants but is survived by a parent or parents and by a brother or sister (or descendants of a deceased brother or sister), the siblings or their descendants inherit the separate property, but subject to a usufruct in favor of the surviving parent or parents. Where both parents survive, that usufruct is joint and then successive as each parent dies.
La. Civ. Code art. 892 addresses two related situations. If the deceased leaves no descendants and no parents, surviving siblings (or their descendants) inherit the separate property in full ownership, free of any usufruct, to the exclusion of more distant relatives. Conversely, if the deceased leaves no descendants and no siblings or their descendants, the surviving parent or parents inherit the separate property in full ownership, again to the exclusion of more distant relatives.
Where siblings inherit together and were born of different unions — for example, one sibling shares only the deceased's mother and another shares only the deceased's father — Louisiana law does not simply divide the estate equally by headcount. Instead, the property is divided into two equal shares, one attributed to the deceased's paternal line and one to the maternal line. A full-blood sibling, who shares both parents with the deceased, takes a share in both lines, while a half-blood sibling takes only in the line the two actually share. This split can produce a different result than a simple equal division among all surviving siblings, and it is a detail families often miss until it changes what a specific half-sibling actually receives.
Where the deceased leaves no descendants, no parents, and no siblings or their descendants, La. Civ. Code art. 894 gives the surviving spouse the deceased's separate property outright, ahead of more distant ascendants and collaterals such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins.
If the deceased leaves no descendants, no siblings or their descendants, no parents, and no surviving spouse, La. Civ. Code art. 895 passes the separate property to more distant ascendants, such as grandparents. Where the paternal and maternal ascendants are in the same degree of relationship, the property is again divided into two equal shares between the two lines, echoing the same paternal-maternal split described above for siblings. Failing any ascendant at all, La. Civ. Code art. 896 extends the search to other collateral relatives, such as aunts, uncles, and cousins. These more distant scenarios are uncommon, and identifying the correct heirs under Louisiana's remaining intestacy provisions generally calls for a careful review of the family's genealogy.
La. Civ. Code art. 881 defines representation as "a fiction of law, the effect of which is to put the representative in the place, degree, and rights of the person represented." In practical terms, if one of the deceased's children died before the deceased but left children of their own, those grandchildren step into their deceased parent's place and collectively receive the share that parent would have received. La. Civ. Code art. 882 requires that this division be made by roots, not by heads: the estate is first divided among the branches the represented person's generation would have created, and only within a branch that has more than one representative is that branch's share divided equally among its members. Representation is available in the descending line, as with grandchildren, and in the collateral line, as with nieces and nephews standing in for a deceased sibling, but it is not available in favor of ascendants such as parents or grandparents.
Where the deceased is survived by descendants, La. Civ. Code art. 890 does not give those descendants immediate, unrestricted ownership of the deceased's share of the community property. Instead, the surviving spouse receives a usufruct — the right to possess, use, and enjoy the property — over the deceased's share of the community property, to the extent the deceased did not dispose of it by testament, while the descendants hold the naked ownership underneath. The descendants own the property, but the surviving spouse controls and benefits from it during the usufruct's term. That usufruct ends automatically when the surviving spouse dies or remarries, at which point the descendants' naked ownership converts into full, unencumbered ownership.
Adoption and biological parentage outside of marriage both raise questions specific to intestate succession, and Louisiana law answers them directly rather than leaving them to family understanding or a birth certificate alone. Under La. Civ. Code art. 199, an adopted child becomes the legal child of the adopting parent for all purposes, including intestate succession, and inherits accordingly; the same article also allows the adopted child and his descendants to retain the right to inherit from the child's former legal parent and that parent's relatives, so adoption does not automatically cut off the earlier family relationship for succession purposes. A child born outside marriage inherits from a parent once legal parentage, called filiation, is established. Where paternity was never formally acknowledged during the father's lifetime, La. Civ. Code art. 197 allows a child to prove paternity after the father's death, but only within a one-year peremptive period running from the date of death, and only by clear and convincing evidence — a materially higher bar than in an ordinary civil dispute, reflecting how much harder that proof becomes once the alleged parent can no longer be asked directly.
Intestacy determines who inherits; it does not by itself transfer title. Heirs still generally need to open a succession in the district court of the parish where the deceased was domiciled, whether through a small succession affidavit for a qualifying smaller estate or a formal judicial succession that ends in a judgment of possession recorded in the parish's public records. Without that step, immovable property remains listed in the deceased's name, which can prevent heirs from selling, mortgaging, or clearing title, sometimes for years. The mechanics of that process are the same regardless of whether a will exists, and are addressed in more detail elsewhere.
People frequently assume Louisiana's intestacy rules will simply "give everything to the spouse," and that assumption is often wrong when descendants survive. A blended family is a common example: if a surviving spouse and stepchildren are not the spouse's own biological or adopted children, the community-property usufruct under Article 890 and the descendants' naked ownership can create friction that a will drafted with the family's actual composition in mind would have avoided. Separate property inherited from a parent, kept in a spouse's name alone, or acquired before the marriage follows an entirely different path than community property, which can produce results a family did not anticipate, particularly in a household with children from more than one relationship. A will remains the most direct way for a person to depart from these default rules, within the limits Louisiana's forced heirship law places on disinheriting a qualifying child, and its absence is what puts a family squarely inside the intestacy rules described above.
Louisiana intestate succession sends a deceased person's estate to descendants first, and in their absence to a specific combination of surviving spouse, parents, and siblings that depends on exactly who survives and whether the property is separate or community. A surviving spouse takes community property outright when there are no descendants, but only a usufruct over it when descendants exist, while separate property follows its own order under La. Civ. Code arts. 891, 892, and 894. Adopted children and children whose parentage was never formally established have their own rules under Articles 199 and 197. Because the outcome depends entirely on the family's specific composition and the character of the property involved, a family in Monroe, West Monroe, or elsewhere in Ouachita Parish facing a succession without a will is welcome to contact Hudson, Potts & Bernstein, LLP through our contact page to discuss the situation.
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